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KARL MARX 

A SKETCH 

BY 

ACHILLE LORIA 



KARL MARX 



BY 

ACHILLE LORIA 

il 



AUTHORISED TRANSLATION FROM THE ITALIAN 
WITH A FOREWORD 

BY 

EDEN & CEDAR PAUL 



▼ 



New York 

THOMAS SELTZER 

1920 






6^ 
1^9 



Copyright, 1920, 
By Thomas Seltzer, Inc. 



All Rights Reserved 



Printed in the United States of America 



§>CI.A608013 



^> 



The socialism that inspires hopes and fears 
to-day is of the school of Marx. No one is 
seriously apprehensive of any other so-called 
socialistic movement, and no one is seriously 
concerned to criticise or refute the doctrines 
set forth by any other school of "socialists" 



FOREWORD 

BY 

EDEN and CEDAR PAUL 



FOREWORD 

It HAS been said that the professional and 
professorial exponents of economic science 
confine themselves to variants of a single 
theme. Usually belonging to the master class 
by birth and education, and at any rate at- 
tached to that class by the ties of economic in- 
terest, they are ever guided by the conscious 
or subconscious aim of providing a theoretical 
justification for the capitalist system, and their 
lives are devoted to inculcating the art of ex- 
tracting honey from the hive without alarm- 
ing the bees. Achille Loria is an exception to 
this generalisation. Professor of political 
economy at Turin, and one of the most learned 
economists of the day, he is anything but an 
apologist for the bourgeois economy. With 

9 



io FOREWORD 

the exception of the first volume of Marx's 
Capital, no more telling indictment of capital- 
ism has ever been penned than Loria's Analy- 
sis of Capitalist Property (1889). 

This gigantic work has not been translated, 
but a number of Loria's books are available 
to English readers: The Economic Founda- 
tions of Society, 1902; Contemporary Social 
Problems, 191 1 ; The Economic Synthesis, 
1914. A biographical and critical study of 
Malthus, in the Italian, was rendered into 
English in 1917 and published in the United 
States as the opening chapter of a symposium 
on Population and Birth Control edited by the 
writers of this foreword. The Economic 
Foundations of Society has run through five 
editions in Swan Sonnenschein's (now Allen 
& Unwin's) "Social Science Series." But on 
the whole Loria's works are less widely known 
in England and America than on the conti- 
nent, far less widely known than they deserve 
to be. 



FOREWORD ii 

An exposition of his outlook and a study of 
his relationship to Marx will not only be of 
interest in themselves, but will help readers to 
surmount certain terminological difficulties in 
the Karl Marx. All original thinkers write 
perforce in a language of their own minting. 
Those of us to whom "surplus value," the 
"class struggle," the "materialist conception," 
"economic determinism," have been familiar 
concepts from childhood upwards, are apt to 
forget that Marx's contemporaries were re- 
pelled by what they regarded as superfluous 
jargon. The first students of Kant, the first 
students of Darwin, the first students of all 
great innovators in philosophy, science, and 
the arts, have had to master a new vocabulary 
before they could understand what these writ- 
ers were driving at; for new ideas must be 
conveyed in a new speech or by the use of old 
words refashioned. We cannot understand 
Loria, we cannot appreciate Loria's criticism 
of Marx, we cannot grasp the nature of Loria's 



12 FOREWORD 

own affiliation to Marx, unless we realise pre- 
cisely what the Italian economist means by the 
speciously familiar terms "income," "subsist- 
ence," "unproductive labourers," "recipients 
of income," and the like. The familiarity of 
the words makes them all the more mislead- 
ing to those who do not hold the Lorian clue 
to guide them through the economic labyrinth. 
Does this sound alarming? Yet Loria's doc- 
trines, like those of Marx, like those of Dar- 
win, like those of — but we must not say "like 
those of Kant" — are simplicity itself to anyone 
who is able to survive the first shock of the 
encounter, to surmount the first agony of a new 
idea. 

In our own view the difficulty of economics 
in large part depends upon the fact that it is 
either a system of apologetics or else a system 
of attack. There are, in fact, two conflicting 
sciences: the economic science of the master 
class, and the economic science of the prole- 



FOREWORD 13 

tariat Both are necessarily tendentious, and 
the conflicting tendencies will remain irrecon- 
cilable as long as the class struggle continues. 
Not until that struggle has been fought to a 
successful issue, not until the co-operative 
commonwealth has come into existence, can 
there be a comparatively dispassionate politi- 
cal economy. As dispassionate as conic sec- 
tions it can never be, for it is biological, socio- 
logical, is by its very nature tinged with human 
interest, and can therefore never be wholly im- 
partial. But many of the contradictions and 
perplexities of economics are by no means in- 
herent; they are, we contend, no more than 
confusing reflexes of the class struggle. 

Loria seems to hold a somewhat similar 
opinion. In Contemporary Social Problems 
(pp. 99, 100) he writes : "I am inclined to con- 
sider political economy and socialism as two 
intellectual weapons which, for a long time 
separate and mutually antagonistic owing to 
the apologetic theories of the one and the sub- 



i 4 FOREWORD 

versive utopianism of the other, are drawing 
closer and closer together as they become more 
human and the old animosities disappear. 
Perhaps the day is not far distant when the 
two forces will unite under one standard." To 
a casual reader this might suggest that Loria 
thinks that the class struggle, that the conflict 
between orthodox economics and socialism, 
can be overcome within the framework of the 
bourgeois economy — that the capitalist Old- 
Man-of-the-Sea can at one and the same time 
remain seated upon the back of the proletarian 
Sindbad the Sailor, and walk beside him 
amicably arm in arm as the two climb the 
mount of human endeavour. But an attentive 
student of Loria's Karl Marx will realise that 
when the Italian speaks of "a day not far dis- 
tant," he means the morrow of the social revo- 
lution, when Marx's promethean work shall 
have been completed, and when, led by Marx 
"the emperor in the realm of mind," the 
human race shall have reached "the brilliant 



FOREWORD 15 

goal which awaits it in a future not perhaps 
immeasurably remote" (infra p. 162). 

For Loria, one of the greatest living cham- 
pions of the doctrine of economic determin- 
ism, sees no difficulty in reconciling that 
doctrine with a firm belief in the magistral 
efficacy, at the stage which evolution has now 
reached, of the deliberate human will. "The 
economic natural force," writes Eduard Bern- 
stein {Evolutionary Socialism, p. 14), "like 
the physical, changes from the ruler of man- 
kind to its servant, according as its nature is 
recognised." Herein is embodied the appli- 
cation in the special economic field of the pro- 
found general truth that by scientific study 
man, the child of nature, learns to control na- 
ture, and thereby to mould his own being and 
social environment in accordance with the dic- 
tates of his own enlightened will. Similarly 
Loria is far from the rigid economic deter- 
minism which would refuse to admit the 
existence of "ideal" causation, or the possi- 



16 FOREWORD 

bility in the sphere of sociology of intelligently 
adapting means to ends. "Idealism" is a word 
which has been soiled by such ignoble use that 
one really hesitates to employ it; but we must 
distinguish between idealism and sentimental- 
ism, and between idealism and window dress- 
ing. The right sort of idealism is realist 
idealism, and Loria is a realist idealist. He 
distinguishes clearly between fatalism and 
quietism, on the one hand, and economic de- 
terminism tempered by rationalist guidance, 
on the other. 

In The Economic Foundations of Society 
(pp. 376 et seq.) he writes: "Can we say that 
a doctrine leads to fatalism which concedes a 
fertile field to human activity, and which only 
seeks to mark out the limits within which such 
efforts may be applied ? Can we give the name 
of quietism to a theory whose aims lie in the 
direction of substituting enlightened action, 
aware of its ends, for blind and ignorant inno- 
vation which is powerless to realise its pur- 



FOREWORD 17 

poses? . . . Turning to consider the great 
social transformations which alter the struc- 
ture of property, our theory does, it is true, 
deny that such movements can be effected be- 
fore the necessary change in economic condi- 
tions has rendered them inevitable; but far 
from this conclusion leading to the degradation 
of human nature, it seems to us to inspire the 
highest sentiments. If we examine the great 
spontaneous movements that have sought to 
modify economic conditions before their time, 
we shall find that they all lacked definite pur- 
pose. There was no clear idea of the new 
order of things to be substituted for the old; 
on this account these movements were wanting 
in discipline; they were anarchic, and hence 
their lack of effect. Our theory, on the con- 
trary, declares that it is first of all necessary 
to learn the nature of the future social system, 
and, after this knowledge has been acquired, 
to substitute a co-ordination of effort towards 
this rigorously determined end for the blind 



1 8 FOREWORD 

and disorganised attempts that have thus far 
been made in this direction. . . . Far from 
leading towards fatalism our theory tends to 
encourage rational human activity, which 
alone can prevent, or at least mitigate, the 
confusion otherwise attendant upon the social 
metamorphosis. ... A wide field is thus 
opened to human activity, and it is certainly 
a noble mission for mankind to withdraw so- 
cial development from the operation of the 
blind and brutal forces of physical evolution 
and to submit the process to the kindlier and 
more civilised action of human reason." 

The definitive exposition of Loria's views is 
to be found in The Economic Synthesis; but 
since in his theory of social evolution the ef- 
fects of increasing population play so notable 
a part, reference must first be made to his 
examination of Malthus' theory of population. 
At the outset, however, let us recall Marx's 
attitude to the Malthusian doctrine. 



FOREWORD 19 

Marx rejected the idea that, for human be- 
ings, population tends to grow in such a man- 
ner as necessarily to press on the means of 
subsistence. Though he accepted Darwinism 
and had a profound admiration for Darwin, 
as far as the human species is concerned he 
rejected Malthusianism (on which Darwin- 
ism is based), and wrote of Malthus in terms 
of bitter personal hostility. The animus we 
may ignore, but the arguments are worth re- 
capitulating. Pressure of population, he says, 
is the outcome of capitalism. On p. 645 of 
Capital Marx writes: "The labouring popu- 
lation . . . produces, along with the accumu- 
lation of capital produced by it, the means by 
which it is itself made relatively superfluous, 
is turned into a relatively surplus population, 
and it does this always to an increasing extent. 
This is a law of population peculiar to the 
capitalist mode of production, and in fact 
every special historic mode of production has 
its own special laws of population, historically 



20 FOREWORD 

valid within its limits alone. An abstract law 
of population exists for plants and animals 
only, and only in so far as man has not inter- 
fered with them." Later in the same chapter 
he says (in effect) that undue fertility is char- 
acteristic of poverty-stricken circumstances, 
and that with improved conditions the popu- 
lation difficulty tends to settle itself. 

We shall see that Loria says much the same 
thing, and shall consider the assertion pres- 
ently. 

At a later date (1875) Marx writes some- 
what more guardedly. In his Criticism of the 
Gotha Programme the reference to the Mal- 
thusian doctrine of population runs as follows : 
"But if I accept this law [the iron law of 
wages] as formulated by Lassalle, I must 
likewise accept its foundation. What is this 
foundation? As F. A. Lange showed shortly 
after Lassalle's death, the iron law of wages 
is founded upon Malthus' theory of popula- 
tion, a theory which Lange himself espoused. 






FOREWORD 21 

Now if the iron law of wages be correct, it is 
impossible to abrogate it, even if we should do 
away with wage labour a hundred times over, 
for not the wage system alone, but every social 
system, must be governed by the law. Upon 
this foundation, for fifty years and more, econ- 
omists have continued to demonstrate that 
socialism could never suppress poverty, which 
they regard as resulting from the nature of 
things. Socialism, they declare, can only gen- 
eralise poverty, can only diffuse it simulta- 
neously over the whole surface of society!" 

Does it not almost seem as if Marx, by 1875, 
had, for a moment at least, glimpsed the real 
difficulty? For if we grant for the sake of 
argument that the excess of population under 
capitalism be only a relative excess, if we grant 
that each historic mode of production has its 
own special law of population, the question we 
have to ask ourselves as socialists is, "What 
will be the law of population under social- 
ism?" May not socialism tend to promote an 



22 FOREWORD 

absolute excess of population? Will not nat- 
ural increase, stimulated by easy circum- 
stances, threaten the stability of the system 
unless the growth of population be deliberately 
checked? Will not the inhabitants of each 
area have to specify some limit beyond which 
it is undesirable that the population of that 
area should increase? Ways and means, social 
and individual, lie beyond our present scope. 
But in our opinion Paul Lafargue, Henry 
George, and many others who have written on 
this question, and who have endeavoured to 
meet the Malthusian difficulty by a simple de- 
nial of the facts upon which "Parson Malthus" 
grounded his theory, have displayed more zeal 
than knowledge. As Karl Pearson wrote 
thirty years ago: "Marx by abusing Malthus 
has not solved the population difficulty"; and 
we agree with the same writer that "the ac- 
ceptance of the law discovered by Malthus is 
an essential of any socialistic theory which pre- 
tends to be scientific"; but happily it is no 



FOREWORD 23 

longer true that "Kautsky seems to stand alone 
among socialists in accepting the Malthusian 
law and its consequences" (The Ethic of Free- 
thought, 1888, pp. 438-9). 

Loria's treatment of the subject is closely- 
akin to that of Marx, though Loria differs 
from Marx in that he speaks with admiration, 
nay almost with veneration, of the author of 
The Principles of Population. As regards 
the main issue, Loria contends that while 
Malthus elucidated a profoundly important 
truth, he erred in respect of many of its appli- 
cations. In present conditions, i.e., under 
capitalism, says Loria, there is no excess of 
population over food supply, but merely (in 
certain countries) an excess of people in rela- 
tion to the privately owned capital which is 
able to secure profitable investment. Hence, 
as a result not of over-population but simply 
of capitalist conditions, we have in addition 
to the mass of the workers who obtain subsist- 
ence, on the one hand an owning class with a 



24 FOREWORD 

superfluity, and on the other a parasitic class 
of dependents, paupers, semi-criminals, and 
criminals. 

He contends, further, that Malthus' theory 
is invalidated by the ascertained fact that, as 
far as human beings are concerned, an excess 
of food over population does not necessarily 
lead to an increase in the birth rate — that a 
rising standard of life is nowadays apt to be 
characterised by diminished procreation. 
Speaking of certain postmalthusian applica- 
tions of Malthus' theory, he writes (Contem- 
porary Social Problems, p. 79) : "Some also 
suggest various physiological expedients — the 
obscene abominations of the so-called neomal- 
thusians — to limit population. Do they not 
see that there is no excess of mouths to be fed, 
and that procreation will of itself diminish 
with the amelioration of the condition of the 
working classes, without recourse to loathsome 
and unnatural practices?" 

In this passage, as repeatedly in his Malthus, 



FOREWORD 25 

Loria fails oddly (for so acute a mind) in his 
analysis of operating causes. As the result of 
a rising standard of life — consequent upon im- 
proved economic conditions among the prole- 
tariat — the workers, we are told (Malthus, p. 
80), "become less prolific. " Thus the growth 
of population is "automatically" regulated by 
economic means, and there is no need to have 
recourse to "physiological expedients" to limit 
population. Yet he nowhere endeavours to 
elucidate the working of this economic factor 
in the biologic field, or to show how it can 
possibly operate unless precisely in virtue of 
what he is so strangely and so inconsistently 
moved to condemn, viz., the deliberate appli- 
cation of increasing physiological knowledge 
by individual couples in order to regulate the 
number of their offspring. In a word, by birth 
control. 

As far as past stages of economic evolution 
are concerned, the transition from primitive 
tribal communism to slavery, from slavery to 



26 FOREWORD 

serfdom and the guild system, and from these 
to capitalism, Loria himself insists that the 
prime motive force has been the pressure of 
increasing population on the means of subsist- 
ence. Thus in Contemporary Social Problems 
(pp. 128 et seq.) he writes : "We easily under- 
stand how evolution takes place in the sphere 
of economic phenomena provided we stead- 
fastly hold in mind the simple premise that 
ceaseless increase in population makes neces- 
sary the occupation and cultivation of lands 
ever less fertile, hence requiring more effica- 
cious means of production to combat the in- 
creasing resistance of matter. Given, there- 
fore, a certain density of population and a cer- 
tain degree of fertility of cultivated land, there 
is rendered not only possible, but also neces- 
sary, a determinate economic system permit- 
ting human labour to attain a commensurate 
productivity; but population increasing, and 
the necessity of cultivating less fertile lands be- 
coming urgent, the economic system hitherto 



FOREWORD 27 

existing proves inadequate, since the degree of 
productivity which it permits to labour is in- 
sufficient to combat matter now become more 
rebellious. As the economic and productive 
system which corresponded with the preceding 
degree of the productivity of the soil has 
grown incompatible with the new and more 
exacting conditions, it must be supplanted by 
a better system. Then follows an epoch of 
social disintegration which destroys the super- 
annuated form, from whose ashes a new struc- 
ture arises; on the ruins of the shattered eco- 
nomic system is erected a new one which al- 
lows human nature to become more produc- 
tive, and is therefore adapted, for a time, to 
combat the increasing resistance of matter. 
However, with each additional increment to 
population, a moment comes when it is neces- 
sary to bring under cultivation lands which 
are still more resistant, and for the develop- 
ment of which the prevailing economic system 
is found to be inadequate; consequently this 



28 FOREWORD 

system suffers the fate of those which have pre- 
ceded it, and it is in turn destroyed to give 
place to a new and superior form." 

The detailed application of these ideas is 
one of the main themes of Loria's Analysis of 
Capitalist Property. We learn, he says, from 
history and statistics that capitalistic property 
(the term is here used by Loria in the widest 
sense to include all the forms of property 
which render possible the exploitation of one 
human being by another) is everywhere and 
at all times due to one and the same cause, the 
suppression of free land. As long as there is 
any free land, as long as any man who so de- 
sires can take possession of a piece of land and 
develop it by his labour, capitalistic property 
is impossible, because no man will willingly 
work for another when he can establish him- 
self for his own account on a piece of land 
without paying for it. Where there is free 
land, labour owns the means of production, so 



FOREWORD 29 

that agriculture is carried on by free peasants 
on small holdings, whilst manufacturing in- 
dustry (in so far as this exists at such a stage) 
is in the hands of independent artisans. In 
these conditions labour is isolated, and isolated 
labour rarely produces anything more than the 
labourer's subsistence. The regular supple- 
mentary production of "income" is the charac- 
teristic feature of associated labour. 

This brings us to The Economic Synthesis, 
a work which bears as sub-title "A Study of 
the Laws of Income." It is, Loria tells us, 
"the complement and the theoretic crown" of 
all his earlier writings. The meaning he at- 
taches to the word income is, in truth, simple 
enough ; but that meaning is the very core of 
Lorianism, just as surplus value is (for many) 
the very core of Marxism. Isolated labour, 
labour of the kind described in the last para- 
graph, produces, says Loria, first of all sub- 
sistence — the bare necessities of life. In ex- 
ceptionally favourable conditions even isolated 



3 o FOREWORD 

labour may produce something more than this, 
and that something more is income. But as a 
rule, and more and more as population in- 
creases and land of diminishing fertility has 
to be brought under cultivation, isolated labour 
fails to produce anything beyond subsistence, 
fails to produce even that, so that it becomes 
necessary to have recourse to the superior pro- 
ductivity of associated labour. Now for this, 
since the natural man is averse from associated 
labour, some form of coercion, direct or indi- 
rect, is essential; and the history of all the de- 
veloped economic systems that have hitherto 
prevailed is the history, in one form or 
another, of the coercion to associated labour. 
Income, in the Lorian sense of the term, is 
"the specific product of associated labour"; 
i.e., it is the surplus produced by labour be- 
cause it is associated, over and above what the 
labourers could have produced in isolation. 
Working in isolation they produce, or theoret- 
ically might have produced, subsistence for 



FOREWORD 31 

themselves; associated they produce something 
more, which is income, and this accrues to 
those who control and direct the associating 
force. 

In primitive tribal communism that force 
emanates from the collectivity of economic 
equals, and the "undifferentiated income" is 
communally owned and consumed. But sub- 
sequently "differentiated income," received by 
non-labourers, makes its appearance. In 
slave-owning communities, differentiated in- 
come goes to the slave owners; in feudal serf- 
dom, it accrues to the baronage; under modern 
capitalist conditions the dispossessed prole- 
tarian masses produce of course their own sub- 
sistence, and produce in addition income for 
the legal owners of land and capital. Slave 
owners, barons, capitalists, are in successive 
stages the "recipients of [differentiated] in- 
come." 

Throughout the history of these economic 
phases there has been a conflict between the in- 



32 FOREWORD 

terests of the labourers and those of the re- 
cipients of income, taking the form, in times 
of exceptional stress, of slave insurrections and 
slave wars, of jacqueries and ruthless reprisals 
by the baronage, of strikes and lock-outs. 
Here we have one aspect of what Loria terms 
"the struggle between subsistence and in- 
come," and this aspect coincides obviously 
enough with one aspect of the Marxist class 
struggle. 

The association of labour is the prime cause 
of labour's enhanced productivity. But while 
the association increases productivity, the co- 
ercion that is requisite to secure association 
exercises a restrictive influence upon produc- 
tivity, the restriction being more marked in 
proportion to the severity of the coercion. 
Thus the crude and harsh coercion of the 
slave-owning system makes slave labour (in 
part for psychological reasons dependent upon 
the mentality of the labourer) less productive 
than serf labour under the feudal system, 



FOREWORD 33 

wherein coercion was somewhat milder. In 
modern capitalism coercion, though still very 
real, is veiled, and for this reason (quite apart 
from the peculiar advantages of machinofac- 
ture) associated labour is more productive 
under capitalism. 

It is the superior productivity of each suc- 
cessive system which has rendered it victorious 
over its predecessor. With the dry light of 
economic science Loria displays for us the 
working of the type of production dominant 
to-day, the most effective system of production 
the world has yet known. 

Such is Loria's outline picture of the suc- 
cession of economic phases. 

It is impossible here to trace the Italian 
economist's detailed analysis of the causes 
which lead to the break up of one economic 
system and its replacement by another. Suffice 
it to say that in his view an important part is 
played by the action of those whom he calls 
"unproductive labourers," members of the 



34 FOREWORD 

educated caste living also on differentiated 
income, on portions of income reallotted by the 
primary recipients of income, whose interests, 
in the prosperous phase of any system of in- 
come, the educated caste is thus paid to serve. 
A typical service is that of the priestly order, 
which is maintained "to pervert the egoism" 
of the labourers, to delude them into the belief 
that they are pursuing their own better inter- 
ests by peacefully and diligently producing 
income for the master class. 

But in the declining phase of any economic 
system (and Loria considers that the wage sys- 
tem of capitalism has now, despite its imposing 
appearance, actually entered its declining 
phase), the diminution of income curtails the 
amount available for reallotment to the un- 
productive labourers. Hence from support- 
ers of the existing system they are speedily 
transformed into its active opponents. These 
"intellectuals" now make common cause with 
the labourers, the disinherited of the earth; 



FOREWORD 35 

and the old property system totters to its fall. 
He writes {The Economic Foundations of 
Society, p. 347) : "All revolutions undertaken 
by the non-proprietary classes alone, without 
the support of the unproductive labourers, are 
. . . foredoomed to failure. The rebels, di- 
vided and disorganised, not at all sure of them- 
selves and uncertain of the ends they would 
attain, soon fall back under the dominion of 
the proprietary class. . . . The ancient econ- 
omy was not destroyed by the revolt of the 
slaves, nor was the ruin of the medieval econ- 
omy effected by the armed uprising of the 
serfs. These two economic systems did not 
succumb until the clients of the Roman econ- 
omy and the ecclesiastics of the medieval 
economy were induced by a f alling-off of their 
share in the constantly decreasing revenues 
[income] to break their long-standing alliance 
with the revenue holders [recipients of in- 
come] and to lend their support to the final 
revolt of the labouring classes." 



36 FOREWORD 

To the Lorian theory of revolution we shall 
return in conclusion, after we have discussed 
the relationships of Loria to Marx. The 
theory involves tactical questions of the ut- 
most interest and importance. Apart from 
these, the crux of the problem of transition to 
the co-operative commonwealth centres, as 
most thoughtful socialists are coming to see, 
around the question of the coercion to associ- 
ated labour. A fundamental part of the 
socialist outlook is the belief that the existence 
of a special class of recipients of income, 
whether these be slave owners, feudal barons, 
or legal monopolists of land and capital, is not 
needful to modern civilisation. We affirm 
that the disappearance of such a class (though 
that class may have played a necessary part 
in social evolution) can now be witnessed by 
the enlightened without a single regret. But 
what is to ensure the continuance of that high 
social productivity which will be necessary to 
the maintenance of general wellbeing? Now 



FOREWORD 37 

that our race is at length becoming truly self- 
conscious, will it be possible "to transform the 
economic natural force from the ruler of man- 
kind to its servant?" 

The closing sentences of The Economic Syn- 
thesis show in outline how Loria envisages that 
possibility: "The essential social contradiction 
can be eliminated, economic equilibrium can 
be established, only by means of a profound 
transformation, affecting not merely the proc- 
ess of distribution but also the process of 
production, relieving this latter process from 
the coercion which has hitherto environed it 
and restricted its efficiency; in other words by 
the destruction of the coercive association of 
labour and its replacement by the free associ- 
ation of labour. Herein is to be found the su- 
preme objective towards which must converge 
all the forces of social renovation." And in a 
terminal footnote he adds : "This is now under- 
stood by all the most enlightened economists, 
not excepting the socialists, who point out that 



38 FOREWORD 

a reform which effects no more than the dis- 
tribution of income among the proletarians, 
while leaving unaffected the method by which 
that income is actually produced, would have 
no more than an extremely restricted and fugi- 
tive effect; and that a decisive and durable 
social renovation must be initiated by a radical 
metamorphosis in the process of production." 

We have now to ask, what does Loria con- 
sider the most important elements of Marxist 
teaching? In his account of the Communist 
Manifesto (infra p. 68) he tells us that "this 
writing contains the whole Marxist system in 
miniature, and . . . supplies a critique of all 
doctrinaire, idealist, and Utopian forms of 
socialism. Thus the Manifesto voices the two 
fundamentals of Marxism: the dependence of 
economic evolution upon the evolution of the 
instrument of production, in other words the 
technicist determination of economics; and 
the derivation of the political, moral, and ideal 



FOREWORD 39 

order from the economic order, in other words 
the economic determination of sociology — or, 
as we should express it to-day, historical mate- 
rialism." 

On pp. 145 and 146 he tells us that we must 
"recognise in Marx the supreme merit of hav- 
ing been the first to introduce the evolutionary 
concept into the domain of sociology, the first 
to introduce it in the only form appropriate to 
social phenomena and social institutions; not 
as" an "unceasing and gradual upward move- 
ment," but as a "succession of age-long cycles 
rhythmically interrupted by revolutionary ex- 
plosions." Speaking of Marx's "masterly in- 
vestigation into the successive forms of the 
technical instrument, of productive machin- 
ery," he says that Marx may be termed "the 
Darwin of technology. . . . This physiology 
of industry, which is now the least studied and 
least appreciated of Marx's scientific labours, 
nevertheless constitutes his most considerable 
and most enduring contribution to science." 



4 o FOREWORD 

Loria wrote his Karl Marx nearly two years 
before the publication of William Paul's The 
State, of which pp. 2 to 7, the section on "Man 
and Tools" is devoted to a restatement of this 
aspect of Marxism; and the Italian economist 
is not acquainted with the thought-trend of 
Walton Newbold. As far as the young but 
rapidly growing and vigorous school of British 
Marxists is concerned, it is certainly no longer 
true that Marx's work as "the Darwin of tech- 
nology" is the least studied and least appreci- 
ated of Marx's scientific labours. 

To the class struggle Loria does not refer at 
any length in this essay on Karl Marx. We 
have already seen that he recognises the enor- 
mous part the class struggle has played in 
history; but he has throughout life remained 
the man of science, the man of the study; he 
has never entered the arena as what the French 
term a "militant." In 1904, when the Italian 
Socialist Party wished him to be socialist par- 
liamentary candidate for Turin, Loria refused 



FOREWORD 41 

on the ground that parliamentary life would 
interfere with his theoretical studies; and it 
may be that for these and other reasons he is 
less keenly impressed than are most left-wing 
socialists of the profound importance of dif- 
fusing among the workers awareness of the 
class struggle. 

Economic determinism has been sufficiently 
considered in what has gone before. If in the 
present study Loria says less about it than 
about some of the other elements of Marxism, 
this is not because he considers it of minor 
importance, nor because he accepts it uncritic- 
ally, but because he has devoted an entire 
volume to the exposition of this aspect of 
reality. 

It remains, then, to discuss Loria's outlook 
on the Marxist theory of value. It is here that 
Lorianism will be most strenuously challenged 
by those more enthusiastic disciples of Marx 
who, even if they do not accept the dogma of 
Marx's infallibility, none the less regard the 



42 FOREWORD 

doctrine of value, based on the labour theory 
of value, as the very heart of Marxist so- 
cialism. 

We must remember that it is natural for 
persons who do not gain their subsistence by 
applying their labour power to the production 
of commodities, and whose claim to the title of 
"workers" will nevertheless hardly be dis- 
puted, to question the labour theory of value. 
Bernard Shaw, for example, in his pamphlet 
The Impossibilities of Anarchism, protests 
that it is "natural for the [manual] labourer 
to insist that labour ought to be the measure 
of price, and that the just wage of labour is its 
average product; but the first lesson he has to 
learn in economics is that labour is not and 
never can be the measure of price under a com- 
petitive system. Not until the progress of 
socialism replaces competitive production and 
distribution with individual greed for its in- 
centive, by collectivist production and distri- 
bution with fair play all round for its 



FOREWORD 43 

incentive, will the prices either of labour or 
of commodities represent their just value." 

Leaving Shaw to the tender mercies of the 
orthodox Marxists who will not be slow to 
declare that if he means "value" he should not 
say "price," and that if he thinks that "price" 
and "value" are interchangeable terms he is 
not worth powder and shot, and without our- 
selves venturing to rush into the fray, we may 
suggest that our propagandists would be less 
inclined to make the Marxist theory of value 
an article of faith, "which faith except every- 
one do keep whole and undefiled without 
doubt he shall perish everlastingly" — if they 
could realise that the theory is perhaps no 
more than a difficult point of abstract eco- 
nomic doctrine which is not essential to the use 
of the conception of surplus value as a means 
of making the worker aware of the basic char- 
acter of capitalist exploitation. Bernstein 
explains the matter very well in the book 
previously quoted (p. 35) : "Practical experi- 



44 FOREWORD 

ence shows that in the production and distri- 
bution of commodities a part only of the 
community takes an active share, whilst an- 
other part consists of persons who either enjoy 
an income for services which have no direct 
relation to the process of production, or have 
an income without working at all. An essen- 
tially greater number of men thus live on the 
labour of all those engaged in production than 
are actively engaged in it, and income statistics 
show that the classes not actively engaged in 
production appropriate, moreover, a much 
greater share of the total produced than the 
ratio of their number to that of the actively 
producing class. The surplus labour of the 
latter is an empiric fact, demonstrable by expe- 
rience, which needs no deductive proof. 
Whether the Marxist theory of value be cor- 
rect or not, is quite immaterial to the proof 
of surplus labour. It is in this respect no 
demonstration, but only a means of analysis 
and illustration." 



FOREWORD 45 

The professional economist, however, can- 
not rest content with these loose formulations. 
Loria feels that there is a void in the Marxist 
system, and it seems to us (though Loria 
nowhere tells us so in set terms) that the 
Lorian doctrine of differentiated income, the 
most essential part of the Italian economist's 
teaching, is really an attempt to restate the 
theory of surplus value in a form absolutely 
proof against enemy attack. Be this as it may, 
the conception, however interesting, is far less 
easy to convey to the uninstructed mind, and 
it is unlikely, for propaganda purposes, to re- 
place the simple formula of surplus value. 
But is it not essential that those who under- 
take to teach socialist economics should them- 
selves fully understand the objections to the 
Marxist theory of value, and that they should 
have a clear grasp of Loria's alternative doc- 
trine of the nature of capitalist exploitation? 

Let us return, in conclusion, to the Lorian 



46 FOREWORD 

theory of revolution. If we may summarise 
that theory in colloquial phraseology, it is that, 
while economic evolution must pave the way 
for revolution, the final stages of revolution 
have been effected in the past, and can only be 
effected in the future, through the co-opera- 
tion of "disgruntled intellectuals." These are 
the "unproductive labourers" of Loria's 
scheme, who have served as hirelings of the 
master class during the prosperous phase of 
an economic system ; but in the declining phase 
of that system, when the diminution of income 
curtails the amount available for these second- 
ary recipients of income, they turn against the 
primary recipients, their employers, make 
common cause with the subject class, and give 
the death-blow to the old order. 

This may possibly have been true of the fall 
of the slave economy, and it may possibly have 
been true of the fall of the medieval economy; 
but we do not think it is true that a revolution 
of the non-proprietary classes under capitalism 



FOREWORD 47 

is "foredoomed to failure" unless these classes 
secure the support of the unproductive labour- 
ers. Their support for a genuinely prole- 
tarian revolution can hardly be expected, on 
Loria's own theory. The intellectuals who 
aided in the overthrow of the slave economy, 
and the intellectuals who helped to subvert the 
feudal order and to promote the bourgeois and 
industrial revolution, did so, says Loria, in 
order to maintain their position as "recipients 
of income," to maintain their position as mem- 
bers of a privileged class. What have such 
as they to gain from a proletarian revolution, 
which will abolish class, will put an end to 
exploitation, will do away for ever with the 
private appropriation of income and surplus 
value? 

We need only turn our eyes eastward to see 
how such "intellectuals" will hail the revolu- 
tion of the propertiless. Despite the on- 
slaughts of the capitalist powers, the Russian 
Socialist Federative Soviet Republic has lived 



48 FOREWORD 

long enough to show the sort of help socialists 
may expect from the Kerenskys. Men of this 
calibre, "people whose interests lie in the op- 
posite direction," even if they "are carried 
away by the new ideas and enter the lists for 
the new order of things" (Boudin, The 
Theoretical System of Karl Marx, 1918) , are 
aghast when the real revolution comes, and 
endeavour to lay the red spectre they have 
helped to conjure up. 

In truth, a revolution foredoomed to failure 
would be that of proletarians who should de- 
pend in large measure upon the support of 
disgruntled intellectuals. A serfs life was on 
the average better than that of a chattel slave; 
a wage labourer's life is on the average better 
than was that of slave or serf. But neither the 
replacement of slavery by feudalism, nor the 
replacement of feudalism by capitalism, se- 
cured the emancipation of labour in any ade- 
quate sense of that term. All that a proletarian 
revolution carried through with the help of 



FOREWORD 49 

middle-class intellectuals is likely to oring 
about is some form of Fabian collectivism or 
state capitalism — in a word, the servile state. 
As far as the productive labourers are con- 
cerned the revolution would be a sham. The 
form of the state might be revolutionised, but 
the authoritative state would endure, and pro- 
duction would be effected, not by the free, but 
by the coercive association of labour. 

What Loria has failed to recognise is that 
the conditions of the problem are now radi- 
cally changed. As he says, in the old revolu- 
tions the rebels were divided and disorganised, 
were not sure of themselves, and were 
uncertain of the ends they would attain. As 
far as the workers were concerned, revolt only 
was possible, not revolution. It is otherwise 
to-day; and still more will it be otherwise the 
day after to-morrow. Thanks to the new 
forms of organisation now being worked out: 
thanks to industrial unionism and the growth 
of the workers committees and shop stewards 



50 FOREWORD 

movements; and thanks above all to independ- 
ent working class education, which is forging 
the new weapons and simultaneously teaching 
the workers how to use them, which is fashion- 
ing the limbs of the co-operative common- 
wealth within the womb of the capitalist order 
— thanks to all these things, the workers of the 
day after to-morrow need not put their trust 
in the frail reed of the support of intel- 
lectuals. Once more we raise the Marxist 
slogan and cry: "The emancipation of the 
workers must be the work of the workers 
themselves." 

And if we modify another Marxist watch- 
word, quoted on p. 154 below, that force is the 
midwife of every old society pregnant with a 
new one, it is only to say that, while we do 
not repudiate force (which the skilled ac- 
coucheur ever has in reserve) , new times bring 
new methods. The self-educated workers of 
the future may have no occasion to use force, 
and certainly need not await the aid of Loria's 



FOREWORD 5 1 

unproductive labourers. For the day draws 
nigh, and on that day the workers will achieve 
their own salvation. They will achieve the 
salvation of all the workers, and indeed of all 
the world of man; but it will not be all the 
workers that will actively participate. No 
more will be possible than that there should 
be a considerable minority of educated work- 
ers. A minority they must inevitably remain 
until after the social revolution; but a little 
leaven can leaven a large lump. The midwife 
of revolution is not force but — independent 
working class education. 

In a word, the "dynamogenic function" of 
which Loria speaks (infra pp. 159 and 160), 
attaches not to poverty but to slavery. The 
poor have seldom failed to realise their pov- 
erty, and poverty when extreme has at times 
led to revolt; but it is the new realisation of 
the slavery of wagedom that is organising the 
workers for the social revolution. By means 
of Marxist education "the proletarian is break- 



52 FOREWORD 

ing his chains and entering upon an era of 
conscious and glorious freedom." 

Do we seem to imply that there is no place 
in our movement for middle-class intellect- 
uals? Such is not our meaning. They have 
played in the past a role of supreme import- 
ance, and may still have a notable part to play 
in the future. But the intellectuals for whom 
there is a place are not the kind of intellectuals 
described in Loria's theory of revolution, and 
the role of the intellectual is no longer the one 
which he assigns. It is not those intellectuals 
who are dissatisfied with their reallotment of 
income, not those who are discontented with 
their ration of loaves and fishes, not those who 
sigh for the vanishing cakes and ale, who will 
help the coming of the definitive social revo- 
lution. Rarely indeed, too, is the function of 
the socialist intellectual the function of leader- 
ship. To an increasing extent, under the new 
conditions, he tends to be no more than the 
fifth wheel of the revolutionary coach. 



FOREWORD 53 

The right sort of intellectual had a function 
in the past; it was to help the workers to over- 
come their division and disorganisation, to 
help them to be sure of themselves, to help 
them to clear views of the ends they must at- 
tain. That work is afoot. The ferment has 
been created: created by such men as Marx, 
whose abilities would have secured him ease, 
comfort, wealth, had he made his peace with 
bourgeoisdom, but who was a revolutionist by 
deliberate choice; by such men as Engels, a 
well-to-do manufacturer; by such men as 
Loria himself, a university professor; by such 
men as the American, Scott Nearing, who re- 
cently forfeited his academic position because 
he would not keep the class struggle out of his 
lectures on economics. Can it be said that men 
like Herzen, Bakunin, and Kropotkin, have 
been, or that men like Trotzky and Lenin are, 
the disgruntled intellectuals of Loria's theory 
of revolution? Quite apart from leadership 
under such peculiar conditions as obtain in 



54 FOREWORD 

Russia, there is work for socialist intellectuals, 
the work of promoting independent working- 
class education, the work of assisting in the 
spread of the ferment generated by the writ- 
ings of earlier revolutionary thinkers. 

Our conviction that we ourselves, declassed 
bourgeois, have a modest function, that though 
not part of the team, not even spokes of a fifth 
wheel, we may at least help to complete the 
outfit as little dogs under the waggon, is wit- 
nessed by our translation of Achille Loria's 
monograph on Karl Marx. 

Eden and Cedar Paul. 

London, 

The Centenary of Karl Marx, 



KARL MARX 



KARL MARX 

CHAPTER I 

It IS unquestionably one of the strangest of 
anomalies exhibited by the polychrome flora 
of human thought that revolutionary blossoms 
should so frequently spring from aristocratic 
seeds, and that the most incendiary and rebel- 
lious spirits should emerge from a domestic 
and social environment compounded of con- 
servatism and reaction. Yet when we look 
closely into the matter, we find it less strange 
than it may have appeared at first sight. It is, 
in fact, not difficult to understand that those 
only who live in a certain milieu can fully 
apprehend its vices and its constitutional de- 
fects, which are hidden as by a cloud from 
those who live elsewhere. 

It is true enough that many dwellers in the 
57 



58 KARL MARX 

perverted environment lack the intelligence 
which would enable them to understand its 
defects. Others, again, are induced by consid- 
erations of personal advantage to close their 
eyes to the evils they discern, or cynically to 
ignore them. But if a man who grows to ma- 
turity in such an environment be at once in- 
telligent and free from base elements, the sight 
of the evil medium from which he himself has 
sprung will arouse in his mind a righteous 
wrath and a spirit of indomitable rebellion, 
will transform the easy-going and cheerful 
patrician into the prophet and the revolu- 
tionary. 

Such has been the lot of the great rebels of 
the world, of men like Dante, Voltaire, Byron, 
Kropotkin, and Tolstoi, who all sprang from 
the gentle class, and whose birthright placed 
them among the owners of property. Similar 
was the lot of Karl Marx. 

It would, indeed, be difficult to imagine a 
more typically refined and aristocratic entour- 



KARL MARX 59 

age than the one wherein the future high priest 
of the revolution was born and passed his early 
years. He was born at Treves on May 5, 181 8. 
His ancestors on both sides had been distin- 
guished rabbis, famed for their commentaries 
on the scriptures. The father's family was 
originally known as Mordechai, whilst the 
mother's family, Pressburg by name, had come 
from Hungary to settle in Holland. His 
father, an employee in the state service, be- 
came a Christian, and the whole family was 
baptised when Karl was five years of age. As 
he grew up, the young man was an intimate in 
the best houses of the district, and one of his 
closest friends was Edgar von Westphalen, 
who subsequently became a member of the re- 
actionary ManteufTel ministry. In 1843 Marx 
married Westphalen's sister, the beautiful and 
brilliant Jenny. The match proved well as- 
sorted, and was blessed by a love so intense and 
so unfailing as to lead a certain German pastor 
to say that it had been ratified in heaven. 



60 KARL MARX 

Thus by origin Marx belonged to an ex- 
tremely ancient stock devoted to the accumu- 
lation of wealth, whilst his marriage united 
him to the race of German feudatories, fierce 
paladins of the throne and of the altar. Is it 
not then truly remarkable that from such an 
environment, eminently calculated to foster 
ideas of obscurantism and reaction, there 
should emerge the most brilliant, most con- 
sistent, and most invincible example of a 
thinker and revolutionary agitator? 

Unquestionably, Marx's thought, essentially 
slow-moving, laborious, and ever subjected to 
a rigorous process of self-criticism, does not 
seem at first sight characteristically negational 
and rebellious. In youth, indeed, he was still 
no more than the earnest student. Engels tells 
us that he closed his university career at Bonn 
in 1 841 by writing a brilliant thesis upon the 
philosophy of Epicurus, while in leisure mo- 
ments Marx penned verses of no mean order. 
These latter compositions display numerous 



KARL MARX 61 

defects of style ; they are heavy and turgid ; the 
movement is sluggish; their sonorous gravity 
reminds the reader of a company of medieval 
warriors in heavy armour mounting the grand 
staircase: but they are none the less distin- 
guished by remarkable profundity of thought, 
and they may be looked upon as versified 
philosophy rather than as poetry in the proper 
sense of the term. 

In the following year we find Marx at Co- 
logne as editor of the "Rhenish Gazette." His 
editorials, it is true, were at first devoted to 
harmless topics of general interest; but he soon 
began to turn his attention to social questions, 
such as forest thefts, the subdivision of landed 
property, the condition of the peasantry in the 
Moselle district, and French socialism. To 
this last doctrine, the editor declared himself 
adverse, while professing a great personal ad- 
miration for Proudhon. But the discussion 
upon socialism revealed to him his own ig- 
norance and incompetence, and induced him 



62 KARL MARX 

to withdraw from the journalistic arena that 
he might devote himself to study. An excuse 
for resigning his editorship was furnished in 
1843, when the "Rhenish Gazette" found it 
necessary to assume an extremely cautious tone 
in order to avoid the attentions of the police. 
But, like all the more brilliant and free- 
spirited among his contemporaries, he soon 
found himself incommoded by the obscuran- 
tism of Prussia, and, accompanied by his young 
wife, he hastened to Paris, the city of light, 
where there shortly assembled a circle of in- 
tellectual rebels from all lands — France, Ger- 
many, England, Italy, and Russia. The Rus- 
sians predominated, and indeed we learn from 
Marx himself that the most fervent of his dis- 
ciples at this date were drawn from among 
the scions of the Russian nobility and upper 
bourgeoisie, who, when they returned to their 
country, were unhesitatingly to become the 
sycophants of authority. In this cohort of 
spiritual rebels he assumed from the first the 



KARL MARX 63 

position of dictator, and none competed for the 
crown with the revolutionary Caesar. 

People were already beginning to talk of 
the Marxists, and the police made a black 
cross against the name of a Parisian cafe where 
the associates of Marx were wont to assemble. 
He struck up a friendship with Heinrich 
Heine, and one day, accompanied by his staff, 
he paid a formal visit to the poet and declared 
that the latter ought to divide among the exiles 
the pension granted him by Guizot, to which 
suggestion Heine cynically replied that he 
could spend the pension more profitably upon 
himself. Marx had a yet closer intimacy with 
Proudhon, with whom he passed long even- 
ings talking about Hegel and discussing the 
problems of socialism; but this friendship was 
destined ere long to be replaced by fierce hos- 
tility, aroused by fundamental differences of 
opinion. 

In 1844, in conjunction with Arnold Ruge, 
Marx founded the "Franco-German Year 



64 KARL MARX 

Book," of which, however, there appeared but 
one volume, containing writings by Marx him- 
self on the philosophy of law and upon the 
Jews, in addition to letters from Holland, and 
articles by Engels, Heine, Freiligrath, and 
other more or less rebellious spirits. 

These outward activities represent nothing 
more than an interlude or partial episode in 
the series of his essential occupations, science 
and philosophy. Engels' contribution to the 
"Year Book," a criticism of political economy, 
initiated between the two thinkers a friend- 
ship which time was to strengthen and to ren- 
der indissoluble. The first fruit of this friend- 
ship was a joint work entitled The Holy Fam- 
ily, a criticism of the philosophy of Bruno 
Bauer and his followers (1845), stuffed with 
sallies and orphic sayings of doubtful taste and 
still more doubtful value. The young men 
next turned to a weighter task, a criticism of 
posthegelian philosophy, which filled two 
huge octavo manuscript volumes, but has never 



KARL MARX 65 

found a publisher. Nevertheless, Marx tells 
us, this enormous labour cannot be regarded as 
utterly wasted, for it enabled the writers to 
gain an understanding of themselves, and 
traced the lines by which henceforward they 
were to be safely guided through the labyrinth 
of social investigation. 

But revolutionary agitation (which Marx 
continued even amid his philosophical medi- 
tations), and the editorship of the definitely 
antiprussian journal "Forward," now attracted 
the hostile attention of the Prussian govern- 
ment, upon whose demand, in January, 1845, 
Guizot suppressed the periodical and expelled 
Marx from France. Marx removed to Brus- 
sels, where Engels was living, and for the first 
time devoted himself to prolonged and pro- 
found labours. In the year 1847, he published 
in the Belgian capital his book The Poverty 
of Philosophy, a Reply to Proudhon's Philos- 
ophy of Poverty, a harsh criticism of the "eco- 
nomic contradictions" of his rival. Marx re- 



66 KARL MARX 

proached Proudhon for complete ignorance 
of that Hegelian philosophy which Proudhon 
tried to apply to economics, and reproached 
the French socialist yet more for arbitrary and 
fallacious expositions, for the idealisation of 
a tortuous series of fantastic categories (di- 
vision of labour, machines, competition, rent, 
etc.), declaring that Proudhon confined him- 
self in each case to an examination of the good 
and the bad effects without ever troubling to 
throw light upon the nature of the phenomena 
under consideration or upon the course of their 
formation and development. The criticism is 
apt, but might well rebound upon Marx him- 
self, enmeshed at this epoch in a series of cate- 
gories whose progressive evolution he arbi- 
trarily asserted. Further, Marx fiercely 
criticised Proudhon's theory of "constituted 
value," according to which the reduction of 
value to labour cannot be effected in extant 
society, and must be deferred to the future so- 
ciety, fashioned in the brain of the thinker. 



KARL MARX 67 

It is well to point out that Marx, though in the 
first volume of Capital he conceives the reduc- 
tion of value to the quantity of effective labour 
to be one of the immanent laws of capitalist 
economy, nevertheless admits in the third vol- 
ume that in the capitalist economic phase value 
neither is nor can be reduced to the quantity 
of labour, and that value as measured by la- 
bour is merely an archetype or suprasensible 
entity, but not a concrete reality. Substantially 
this means that Marx's labour measure of 
value is, after all, not essentially different from 
the constituted value of Proudhon. But amid 
these unjust or excessive criticisms, Marx's 
book gives utterance to the idea, profoundly 
true, and at that time practically original, that 
economic relationships are no mere arbitrary 
products or derivatives of human will, but are 
the inevitable issue of the existing condition 
of the forces of production. The deduction 
drawn from this is that Utopian socialism, 
which exhausts itself in futile declamations or 



68 KARL MARX 

in yet more futile imaginary reconstructions 
of the social order, must yield place to scien- 
tific socialism, wholly devoted to the analysis 
of the necessary process of economic evolution 
and to the possibility of accelerating that evo- 
lution. 

The same idea can be read between the lines 
of the Lecture on Free Exchange delivered by 
Marx at Brussels on January 9, 1849. Herein 
he asserted that socialism ought to declare in 
favour of freedom of trade, for this, hastening 
the dissolution of the old nationalities and ac- 
centuating the contrast between the bourge- 
oisie and the proletariat, would precipitate the 
dissolution of the capitalist economy. But the 
idea is affirmed far more categorically in the 
Manifesto of the Communist Party, the joint 
composition of Engels and Marx, published in 
the year 1848, embodying the first and most 
decisive formulation of the latter's teaching. 
Even though some of his special theories, sub- 
sequently to secure fuller development in 



KARL MARX 69 

Capital, are but cursorily sketched in the 
Manifesto, even though some of these theories 
(for example, the theory of wages, stated to be 
the price of "wage labour" instead of being 
the price of "labour power") are still in an 
undeveloped and imperfect state, it is never- 
theless true that this writing contains the 
whole Marxist system in miniature, and that it 
supplies a critique of all doctrinaire, idealist, 
and Utopian forms of socialism. 

Thus the Manifesto voices the two funda- 
mentals of Marxism: the dependence of eco- 
nomic evolution upon the evolution of the in- 
strument of production, in other words the 
technicist determination of economics, and the 
derivation of the political, moral, and ideal 
order from the economic order, in other words 
the economic determination of sociology — or, 
as we should express it to-day, historical ma- 
terialism. This dependence of the political 
order upon the economic order, leading as it 
does to the concentration of political pow^r 



70 KARL MARX 

in the hands of those who hold economic 
power, or in the hands of their representatives 
and agents, renders absurd the idea of effecting 
by peaceful political means any amelioration 
in the condition of the proletarian classes, and 
indicates to the dispossessed that revolution is 
their only hope of salvation. To revolution, 
then, or to the compact federation which can 
alone pave the way for revolution, the Mani- 
festo incites the sufferers of the world with the 
historic phrase: "Workers of the world, 
unite." The epoch-making significance of the 
Manifesto is not to-day disputed by the most 
resolute adversaries of that document. It is, 
in fact, the Declaration of Rights of the 
Fourth Estate, the Magna Charta of the revo- 
lutionary proletariat, the oriflamme of fire and 
blood, the standard round which the insurrec- 
tionary phalanxes have ever since mustered. 

Hardly had the message been launched 
upon the world when the young leader hoped 
to translate it into action, for the movements 



KARL MARX 71 

of 1848 and 1849 led the rebel masses to enter- 
tain new and bolder aspirations. Expelled 
from Belgium, Marx first went to Paris, and 
hastened thence to his German homeland, now 
in a ferment, assuming there editorial charge 
of the "New Rhenish Gazette." But although 
the skill of the able editor was for a brief pe- 
riod successful in saving the barque of the 
imperilled gazette from the waves of police 
persecution, a day soon arrived when the situ- 
ation became untenable. An appeal to the 
German people published in the columns of 
the journal advocating a refusal to pay taxes 
led to its suppression and to two criminal 
charges against the editor. Triumphantly 
acquitted by the Cologne jury, but none the 
less exiled by the Prussian government, he im- 
mediately returned to Paris, where it seemed 
to his restless imagination that events were 
taking a more favourable turn. But France 
proved a no securer refuge than Germany, and 
the Parisian government propounded to our 



72 KARL MARX 

agitator a peremptory dilemma, interment in 
the remote department of Morbihan or exile 
from France. He was not likely to hesitate in 
his choice, and indeed at this juncture was glad 
to accept an invitation from the executive com- 
mittee of the Communist Party, then centred 
in London, to remove with his devoted wife to 
that great metropolis (1849). 



CHAPTER II 

In London the saddest trials awaited him, 
for poverty, gloomy companion, sat ever at his 
board from the day of his entry into the British 
capital down to the hour of his last breath. 
One after another of his children died in the 
unwholesome dwellings of his exile, and he 
was forced to beg from friends and comrades 
the scanty coins needed to pay for their burial; 
he and his family had to make the best of a 
diet of bread and potatoes; he was forced to 
pawn his watch and his clothing, to sell his 
books, to tramp the streets in search of any 
help that might offer; the day came when, 
under the lash of hunger, he was compelled 
to contemplate seeking work as railway clerk, 
of placing his daughters out to service, of mak- 

73 



74 KARL MARX 

ing them governesses or actresses, whilst 
himself retiring with his unhappy wife to 
dwell in the proletarian quarter of White- 
chapel. 

The severity of these sufferings did much to 
add a tinge of gall to a character naturally 
acerb, a character which amid the upheavals 
and horrors of exile frequently showed itself 
far from amiable. Mingled sentiments of 
grief and anger fill our minds when, in Marx's 
private letters to Engels, we trace the mani- 
festations of this harshness, which left him un- 
moved by the misfortunes of his dearest 
friends, which led him to make any use he 
could of these friends and then to overwhelm 
them with reproaches and accusations, which 
showed itself (and this is the worst of all) in a 
jealous hatred of comrades less unfortunate 
than himself. Deplorable from every point 
of view was his conduct towards Freiligrath 
and Lassalle, in especial towards Lassalle, 
who had shown him the utmost friendliness, 



KARL MARX 75 

had given him ample financial assistance, had 
entertained him in Berlin, had helped him to 
find a publisher; for Marx subsequently cen- 
sured Lassalle's works with much acrimony, 
beheld his triumphs askance, and commented 
upon the incidents of Lassalle's death in a tone 
of tepid apology. But you well-fed folk who 
amid easy circumstances are studying the life 
of our agitator, be not too ready to blame him, 
and before stoning him bethink yourselves 
of all the miseries the exile must suffer, 
of all the tortures amid which he must bear 
his cross. 

Vainly did he endeavour by hard work to 
free himself from the sad restraints of pov- 
erty. It is true he was able to place articles 
with the "New York Tribune," writing for 
this paper essays on political, economic, and 
financial questions, which secured much ap- 
preciation. But the pay was only one pound 
per article, and he could write but one article 
a week. Collaboration in the production of 



76 KARL MARX 

an American encyclopaedia, to be paid at the 
rate of two dollars a page, seemed to promise 
more ample funds, and with feverish anxiety 
he devoted himself to the production of ar- 
ticles on the most varied topics, well stored 
with facts. But this source of income, limited 
at best, was suddenly interrupted by the out- 
break of the American civil war. The loss 
was not adequately compensated by the possi- 
bility of occasionally inserting some poorly 
paid contribution in a German newspaper like 
the "New Oder Gazette" or in one of the 
Viennese periodicals. 

He was lucky in that certain turns of fortune 
favoured him from those sources of property 
and inheritance which he condemned and at- 
tacked with such persistence and vehemence. 
He had a legacy from his mother-in-law; a 
legacy from his mother; a trifling legacy from 
an aunt; and Wilhelm Wolff, a companion in 
exile, bequeathed him £800. An uncle in 
Holland, whom he had begged for some 



KARL MARX 77 

trifling help, gave him £160; from Lassalle 
and Freiligrath came generous gifts; and 
Droncke, another companion in exile, gave 
£250 to enable him to complete the scientific 
work on which he was engaged. 

But none of these casual resources, however 
extensive, would have saved him from ruin 
had it not been for the providential assistance 
of his friend Friedrich Engels, who applied 
himself to the care of Marx with inexhaustible 
generosity, and with the tenderness of a 
woman. Engels, indeed, will secure a splen- 
did place in the history of socialist thought, 
were it only because of the way in which he 
devoted himself to Marx. It was through 
Engels that Marx was enabled to continue his 
studies and to complete the work which is his 
title to eternal fame. Engels, a well-to-do cot- 
ton spinner at Manchester, gladly responded 
to his friend's unremitting requests for aid, 
succouring him in every emergency. Engels 
was an expert upon military topics, and penned 



78 KARL MARX 

articles which Marx passed on to the "Trib- 
une" and to the encyclopaedia, articles for 
which Marx was paid; Engels sent Marx 
weekly subsidies, and frequently despatched 
gifts of port wine; he made presents of £100 
or £150 at a time; and at length, when his 
business prospered, he gave his friend a regu- 
lar allowance of £350 a year. 

Not even these strokes of good luck sufficed, 
it is true, to restore a satisfactory balance to 
Marx's finances, for he was a bad manager, 
and the disorder was probably incurable. 
However, they enabled our thinker to furnish 
aid to companions yet more unfortunate, to 
Pieper, Eccarius, and Dupont; they enabled 
him to escape from the worst extremities of 
poverty and to establish himself in life under 
conditions more worthy of an honest and re- 
spectable bourgeois. He was able to move 
from the decayed neighbourhood of Soho 
Square and to settle in Maitland Park Road 
on Haverstock Hill; it became possible for 



KARL MARX 79 

him to secure a good education for his daugh- 
ters, to have them taught French and Italian, 
drawing and music; he could weigh the finan- 
cial status of aspirants to their hands, and 
could choose Lafargue and Longuet, who were 
comparatively well off. He often went to the 
theatre, and with one of his daughters he at- 
tended at the Society of Arts a soiree graced 
by the presence of royalty; from time to time 
he took his family to the seaside; he liked his 
wife to sign herself "Jenny, nee Baronne de 
Westphalen"; he was well received in affluent 
circles, and was frequently consulted by the 
"Times" upon financial affairs; finally he ac- 
cepted the office of constable of the vestry of 
St. Pancras, taking the customary oath, and 
donning the regulation uniform on gala oc- 
casions. 

Nevertheless, neither this final settlement 
in a foreign land nor the persecution he suf- 
fered from the government of his own coun- 
try could destroy or even lessen his devotion 



80 KARL MARX 

to Germany. To the day of his death he re- 
mained a faithful child of the fatherland, for 
which he hoped the greatest of futures. He 
sang the praises of German music and litera- 
ture; he delighted in German victories and 
German expansion; he dreaded a weakening 
of German protectionism which might 
strengthen the commercial hegemony of Brit- 
ain; and in 1870 he refused to sign an appeal 
in favour of peace unless it were definitely 
stated that Germany was waging a purely 
defensive war. The French and Russian ex- 
iles in London were indignant, and circulated 
whispers that Marx was a Prussian emissary, 
and had received a bribe of £10,000. An idle 
tale! It is true that among German conser- 
vatives and among the beneficiaries of Ger- 
many there could not be found a supporter 
more sincere and more fervent than was this 
proscribed rebel. But he was no paladin on 
behalf of Prussian imperialism, as we can 
learn beyond dispute from a letter he sent to 



KARL MARX 81 

the "Daily News" in 1878 denouncing Bis- 
marckian ambitions and the Bismarckian ex- 
pansionist policy as a growing peril. 

Yet the supreme aim of his activity and his 
life enormously transcended the circum- 
scribed range of country and of nation, for he 
aspired to a loftier goal, to the organisation of 
the mental and manual workers of all coun- 
tries so that they might constitute a united 
revolutionary force. Within a brief time of 
his arrival in the British metropolis he again 
became the chief, nay the dictator, of a circle 
to which none could be admitted without pass- 
ing a severe examination as to knowledge of 
science in general and of political economy in 
particular, an examination so rigorous that 
even Wilhelm Liebknecht was unable at first 
to satisfy its requirements, an examination 
that was physical as well as mental, for the 
aspirants were subjected (rejoice, shade 
of Lombroso!) to precise craniometrical 
tests. 



82 KARL MARX 

Thus our thinker, crowned as if by divine 
right with a kind of imperial halo, exercised 
undisputed sway over the troop of ex- 
iles, Pieper, Bauer, Blind, Biskamp, Ec- 
carius, Liebknecht, Freiligrath, Cesare Orsini 
(brother of the regicide), and even over the 
revolutionary agitators in Germany. Soon, 
however, his mind was invaded and dominated 
by a yet more ambitious design, for he planned 
the formation of a society which should unite 
the proletarians of all the world into one for- 
midable International, to resist the aggressions 
of capital and to work for the destruction of 
the capitalist system. It was at first an associ- 
ation of modest proportions, consisting merely 
of a few revolutionaries assembled in London. 
Marx absolutely refused the chairmanship, 
contenting himself with the post, ostensibly 
less important, of delegate for the German 
section. 

From the first formation of the new feder- 
ation Marx did his utmost to counteract the 



KARL MARX 83 

influence of Mazzini, for Mazzini, through 
the instrumentality of two of his followers, 
Fontana and the elder Wolff, wished to inspire 
the International with his idealist conceptions 
and to initiate it into the secrets of conspiracy. 
Marx, on the other hand, was unwearying in 
his efforts to advocate his own view that mate- 
rial interests preponderate, and that these in- 
terests must be publicly asserted and defended 
in the arena of history. Soon the federation 
established branches in France, Germany, the 
United States, and even the Latin countries; 
and this involved for Marx, who was really 
the chief, a mass of work in the way of organi- 
sation, and of struggle against those who held 
conflicting views.- Everywhere, in fact, he 
had to encounter trends differing from his 
own, and differing no less extensively one from 
another owing to the varying characters of 
the countries concerned. 

*~ In Germany he had to fight the opportunism 
of Lassalle, a man inclined to compromises 



84 KARL MARX 

and to elastic unions with constituted author- 
ity. In France anti-intellectual tendencies 
were already manifest, so that there was an 
inclination to restrict the socialist outlook to 
an aspiration for immediately practical labour 
legislation of minor importance. In Italy and 
in Spain, Marx's troubles arose from the an- 
archist tendencies characteristic of those coun- 
tries, tendencies fostered by the propaganda 
of Bakunin. 

As against these divergent aims, Marx, with 
inflexible tenacity, maintained his own pro- 
gramme with the utmost rigour, insisting that 
it was essential to federate the proletarian 
forces of the world into an invincible organi- 
sation which in all possible ways, by strikes, 
by parliamentary and legal methods, but also 
by force should need arise, should deliver on- 
slaughts upon the bourgeoisie and upon con- 
stituted authority, should exact concessions of 
increasing importance, and should ultimately 
secure a complete triumph. The proletarians 



KARL MARX 85 

of the two hemispheres were not slow to accept 
the programme; and this man who was him- 
self suffering from actual hunger, now secured 
a great position as a thinker, so that the oper- 
atives of Paris, New York, and Diisseldorf did 
honour to his name. 

These activities, however, did not com- 
pletely interrupt his intellectual labours, for 
during the period at which we have now ar- 
rived he published in the "New York Trib- 
une" a series of articles upon Revolution and 
Counter-revolution in Germany and upon 
Political Struggles in France. In 1852, in 
"The Revolution," published in the German 
tongue in New York, there had appeared the 
article The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis 
Bonaparte. Substantially these writings are 
an application of the materialist conception of 
history to the more conspicuous events of the 
recent political history of Germany and of 
France. In addition, Marx published in the 
"Tribune" a series of articles of a more dis- 



86 KARL MARX 

tinctively political character, dealing with 
The Eastern Question, displaying marvellous 
erudition and a wonderful power of forecast- 
ing events. 



CHAPTER III 

NEVERTHELESS, the organisation of the pro- 
letariat, and his journalistic labours, however 
intense and however weighty, did not repre- 
sent in the life of Marx anything more than a 
vexatious parenthesis or a regrettable delay 
in the fulfilment of the supreme task he had 
set before himself from the very outset of his 
life in Britain. Hardly, in fact, had Marx 
settled down in the wonderful town of Lon- 
don, to the economist so inexhaustible a field 
for study and experience, than he proposed to 
rebuild from the foundations the entire edifice 
of his economic and statistical knowledge, 
which was at that time comparatively small 
when contrasted with the vast extent of his 
preliminary readings in philosophy. In the 
British Museum library, therefore, he plunged 

87 



88 KARL MARX 

into the study of the classical economists of the 
island realm, showing inexhaustible patience 
in tracing the earliest and most trifling ramifi- 
cations of economic science. 

Beginning with the study of the theory of 
rent, he went on to the study of money, of the 
relationship between the quantity of metal in 
circulation and the rate of exchange, of the 
influence of bank reserves upon prices, and so 
forth. He then devoted himself to the theories 
of value, profit, interest, and population. Si- 
multaneously he studied without remission 
statistics, blue books, ministerial and parlia- 
mentary concerns. 

From all this gigantic toil he derived the 
materials for the writing of the work which 
was henceforward to be at once the sorrow 
and the joy of his life. His first intention was 
to limit himself to a critical history of politi- 
cal economy, or a detailed analysis of the 
theories which he had so often enunciated, as 
well as of the lacunae which had become ap- 



KARL MARX 89 

parent in them. But an unexpected result 
issued from the mental contact with this huge 
mass of science and analysis, for he believed 
that he had made a splendid and startling dis- 
covery whereby the sacred theory of profit 
could be utterly exploded. 

Now, therefore, he outlined the design of his 
great work, which was to consist of two parts; 
a first, historico-critical, intended to elucidate 
the different forms of the theory of profit as 
expounded by the various British economists; 
and a second, theoretical and constructive, 
which was to announce to the world the au- 
thor's own doctrine. This method of exposi- 
tion is substantially identical with that fol- 
lowed by Bohm-Bawerk in his Capital and 
Interest, and it corresponds moreover to the 
immediate requirements of the investigation, 
which ought to begin with the study of pre- 
vailing opinions and doctrines, and then only 
proceed to innovation. But a more atten- 
tive examination of the question soon con- 



9 o KARL MARX 

vinced Marx that this would not be the most 
efficacious method of furnishing a theoretical 
reproduction of actualities, since, to this end, 
we must let the phenomena tell their own tale 
before we proceed to call to account those who 
have already analysed them, and before we 
draw attention to the ways in which their con- 
ception of the facts diverges from that which 
reality, when directly questioned, reveals. 
The method has ever been preferred by the 
most gifted theorists, and has been applied by 
Bergson with admirable dexterity in his Crea- 
tive Evolution. Marx, therefore, never weary 
of destroying and refashioning, inverted his 
original design, and promptly began the study 
and analysis of concrete phenomena, to pro- 
ceed then only to a criticism of the theories 
of his precursors. It was in accordance with 
such criteria that he wrote his Criticism of 
Political Economy, of which the first instal- 
ment was published at Berlin in 1859. 
•^The most notable portion of this work is 



KARL MARX 91 

the preface, which contains the first statement 
of the theory of historical materialism. The 
relationships of men in social life, says Marx, 
are determined by the conditions of produc- 
tion, are necessary relationships independent 
of the individual will; these determined rela- 
tionships constitute the real foundation upon 
which is erected the legislative, political, 
moral, and religious superstructure of every 
age. The relationships of production, or the 
economic relationships prevailing at a given 
period, are a natural and necessary outcome 
of the method of production, or rather of the 
historic phase of the instrument of production. 
But sooner or later the further development 
of the productive forces generates a new con- 
figuration in technical method, a configura- 
tion incompatible with the prevailing relation- 
ships of production, those correlative to the 
productive order hitherto dominant. There 
then occurs an explosion, a social revolution, 
which disintegrates economic relationships, 



92 KARL MARX 

and, by ricochet, disintegrates existing social 
relationships, replacing them by better eco- 
nomic relationships, adequate to the new and 
more highly evolved phase of the productive 
instrument. 

In broad outline it may be said that eco- 
nomic evolution has exhibited four progres- 
sive phases; the Asiatic economy, the classical 
economy, the feudalist economy, and the mod- 
ern bourgeois or capitalist economy. The 
evolution of the productive instrument, never 
arrested in its secular march, will in due course 
renew the eternally recurrent opposition be- 
tween the method of production and the rela- 
tionships of production, rendering these in- 
compatible. Once more will come an explo- 
sion, the last of the great social convulsions, 
whereby the bourgeois economic order will be 
overthrown and will be replaced by the co- 
operative commonwealth. This new develop- 
ment will close the primary epoch of the 
history of human society. 



KARL MARX 93 

But the work we are discussing is further 
noteworthy inasmuch as it reflects a special 
phase of our author's thought, a thought which 
never ceased to exhibit a struggle between op- 
posing trends and was ever oppressed by their 
contrast. The book, in fact, shows Marx con- 
tinually involved in antiquated Hegelian 
machinery, or proceeding through a chain of 
categories evolving one from another — capi- 
tal, landed property, the wage system, the 
state, foreign commerce, the world market. 
From each of these categories we may infer 
how the process of their successive develop- 
ment is accomplished. We are led to infer 
that the wage system is the outcome of landed 
proprietorship, for the expropriation of the 
peasant proprietors produces the proletarian- 
ised masses offering labour power for sale; 
and we are led to infer that the constitution of 
the world market is the crown and the epilogue 
of modern capitalist economy. In fact, ac- 
cording to Marx, the historic mission of capi- 



94 KARL MARX 

talism based upon wage labour, whose origins 
go back to the sixteenth century, is the creation 
of the world market. The world market is 
now devoted to the colonisation of California 
and Australia and to the opening of trading 
ports in China and Japan; its creation 
marks the climax of capitalism's historic mis- 
sion, and indicates the approaching end of 
the economic form which was destined to 
fulfill it. 

Now these ideas, in themselves arbitrary and 
fantastic, show how Marx's thought at that 
epoch was still in an undecided or amphibious 
pnase, in which the torrid sun of British eco- 
nomic science had not as yet succeeded in 
totally dispelling the fogs of German philos- 
ophy. But another incompatibility lessens 
the value of the book or diminishes its doc- 
trinal efficacy; for Marx, at this stage of his 
studies, invariably gave to the history of doc- 
trine too preponderant a place, introducing it 
insistently into the course of his own exposi- 



KARL MARX 95 

tion, which was thus deprived of continuity 
and weakened in force. 

Further, the book we are considering did 
not directly bear upon any of the social ques- 
tions which strongly arouse public interest, 
but was- restricted to the study of two theories 
whose importance at first sight seems purely 
academic, the theory of value and the theory 
of money. 

Marx contended that the value of commodi- 
ties is exclusively determined by the quantity 
of labour incorporated into them; he traced 
the affiliations of this thesis with the work of 
its first enunciators in Italy and in England; 
but he did not offer any reasoned demonstra- 
tion of its truth. On the contrary, he frankly 
recognised that this contention is full of con- 
tradictions alike theoretical and practical, con- 
tradictions that appear insoluble; but he 
promised to vanquish them in the subsequent 
course of his exposition. 

Far more noteworthy is the chapter on 



sw 




KARL MARX 



money, for it contains a masterly criticism of 
the quantitative theory of Ricardo, and an ef- 
fective refutation of the "labour notes" idea of 
Bray, Gray, Proudhon, and others. Accord- 
ing to this plan, every producer performing a 
certain quantum of labour would receive from 
the state a voucher entitling him to obtain from 
other producers the result of an equal quantum 
of labour; but the suggestion implies complete 
ignorance of the intrinsic conditions of the in- 
dividualistic economy, wherein each producer 
creates an object without any certainty that 
there will be a market for it, or that it repre- 
sents a real utility and will fetch a definite 
price. It obviously follows that the producer 
cannot be sure that he will be able to sell the 
article which he has produced, or that he will 
be able to transform it into anything with uni- 
versal purchasing power; the product has to 
be baptised or sanctioned by the market, which 
alone has power to stamp it as useful by pur- 
chasing it. 



KARL MARX 97 

Now the "labour note" system claims that it 
can forcibly dispense with the market by sup- 
plying to the producer of an article whose 
utility and saleable value has not been recog- 
nised by the market, a universally available 
purchasing power. The practical outcome of 
this forcible method is that the producer of a 
useless article can by means of his "labour 
note" secure for himself a useful article, 
whereas the producer of this latter will not in 
turn be able to exchange his own "labour note" 
for any object possessing utility; that is to say, 
the article made by the first producer will find 
no purchaser, and the "labour note" of the 
second producer will effect no purchase. This 
is inevitable, for the proposed reform is incon- 
sistent, eclectic, and incomplete, since it pre- 
tends to socialise exchange while maintaining 
production and distribution upon their old in- 
dividualistic basis, and overlooks the incon- 
gruity of any such supposition. 

The "labour note" system cannot rationally 



98 KARL MARX 

be instituted until production has been social- 
ised, or until the state shall impose upon each 
individual the production of a specified 
quantity and quality of commodities, corre- 
latively imposing upon the consumer the obli- 
gation to acquire these. In such conditions, 
however, we could no longer speak of com- 
modities or of exchange, for these phenomena 
belong exclusively to an individualistic econ- 
omy and would have no place in a socialised 
economy. This means that the reform of 
exchange by the suppression of profit can only 
be effected by the suppression of exchange 
itself, by the institution of the co-operative 
commonwealth. Indeed, Robert Owen, who 
proposed the "labour note" system in 1832, 
and was the most brilliant of its advocates, 
clearly recognised this difficulty, and under- 
stood that the socialisation of production 
would be an indispensable preliminary to the 
adoption of the plan. It was the impatience 
of his disciples which forced him to inaugu- 



KARL MARX 



99 



rate the system within the framework of the 
capitalist economy by founding the National 
Equitable Labour Exchange. The logic of 
facts gave a patent demonstration of the irra- 
tionality of the attempt; and Owen, saddened 
and humiliated, was compelled to witness the 
failure of the new institution. 

It will readily be understood that these 
abstruse and abstract investigations, devoid as 
they are of any tangible connection with the 
burning problems of property, were not likely 
to arouse interest among the members of the 
party. Nothing could be more natural than 
the tone of hopeless discouragement with 
which the volume was greeted even by the 
author's most devoted friends. Liebknecht, 
for example, declared that he had never be- 
fore experienced so great a disappointment. 
Biskamp enquired what on earth it was all 
about; Burgers deplored that Marx should 
have published a work so dull and frag- 
mentary. It is true that the book had a mod- 



ioo KARL MARX 

erate sale; Rau quoted it in his treatise; cer- 
tain Russian and American economists made 
it the subject of profound studies. Never- 
theless, the publisher refused to proceed with 
the issue. 

Hardly had this literary bickering come to 
an end when Marx became involved in a vio- 
lent quarrel with the distinguished naturalist 
Karl Vogt, who publicly charged him with 
setting snares for the German exiles and with 
having sordid relationships with the police. 
Marx replied with a savage booklet entitled 
Herr Vogt (London, i860). The style of 
this polemic writing is intolerably vulgar; but 
in other respects the book is noteworthy, for 
it contains interesting revelations anent the 
Italian campaign and the relationships be- 
tween Turin and the Tuileries. We must re- 
member, moreover, that the accusation here 
launched against Vogt, that he was in the pay 
of the Second Empire, was subsequently con- 
firmed beyond dispute, for in 1871 among the 



KARL MARX 101 

ruins of the Tuileries there was found a re- 
ceipt for f rs. 40,000 which had been paid over 
to Vogt. 

But scientific failures, personal contests, 
persistent and distressing domestic discom- 
forts, seemed to inspire our athlete with re- 
newed strength for the continuance of the work 
he had begun. Nevertheless, profiting by ex- 
perience, he decided upon a yet further modi- 
fication in the plan of his book, resolving to 
defer to its final section all historico-critical 
disquisitions, and to concentrate his energies 
upon the positive analysis of concrete reality. 
Further, being prevented by frequent illness 
from tackling the more difficult themes of pure 
economics, he devoted these long intervals of 
comparative leisure to statistical investigations 
and to the perusal of factory inspectors' re- 
ports, of white books and of blue books, and 
he plunged into the study of the economic his- 
tory of Great Britain, so that it became pos- 
sible for him to interleave the pages of 



102 KARL MARX 

abstract theory, necessarily difficult to under- 
stand, with pages that are really living, pages 
that vibrate with the reflex of reality. At 
length, abandoning the method he had previ- 
ously followed of publishing fragmentary 
essays, he decided to rewrite the work through- 
out before sending it to press. 

After several years of incredible labour, the 
days being devoted to reading in the British 
Museum library, and the nights (for he often 
went on writing until four in the morning) to 
literary composition; falling again and again 
beneath the burden of his cross, but ever ris- 
ing to his feet once more, thanks to the demon 
within urging him on and thanks also to the 
sustaining hand of his incomparable friend; 
he at length completed his task, and in the 
spring of 1867 sailed for Hamburg with the 
manuscript of the first volume of Capital, 
which he entrusted to Meissner for publica- 
tion. In Hamburg he passed pleasant days 
with Dr. Kugelmann, a friend and fervent 



KARL MARX 103 

admirer, and with various officials, generals, 
and bankers ; he was visited by a lawyer named 
Warnebold, an emissary from Bismarck, who, 
acting on the minister's instructions, exhorted 
him "to employ his brilliant talents for the 
advantage of the German people." Before 
long, however, he returned to London, where 
he earnestly devoted himself to giving the last 
touches to his book, which was finally issued 
from the press in the autumn of the same year. 
Thus was at length given to the world the 
monumental work destined to revolutionise 
sociological thought, and to give a new and 
higher trend, not to socialism alone, but to 
political economy itself. To sum up its drift 
very briefly, we may say that the argument 
follows three chief lines, value, machinery, and 
primitive accumulation. He set out from the 
fundamental principle (a principle which the 
philosopher Krause had declared to be as im- 
portant to political economy as the fall of 
heavy bodies is important to physics) that the 



104 KARL MARX 

value of products is measured by the mass of 
labour incorporated into them, and drew the 
conclusion that the profit of capital is nothing 
other than the materialisation of a quantity 
of labour expended by the worker, and is in 
other words unpaid labour, stolen and usurped 
income. The worker, that is to say, transmits 
into the product a value equal to the quantity 
of labour incorporated therein, but receives 
from the capitalist a value less than this, a 
value equal to the quantity of labour embodied 
in the commodities necessary to reproduce the 
energy expended by the worker. 

Now the difference between the value of the 
product (that is to say the quantity of labour 
transmitted by the worker into the product) 
and the value of the labour power (that is to 
say the quantity of labour employed in pro- 
ducing the commodities consumed by the 
worker) constitute the surplus value which is 
gratuitously pocketed by the owner of the 
means of production in virtue of the fact that 



KARL MARX 105 

he is owner. In this way Marx attains to the 
qualitative notion of the income of capital, or 
explains whereof that income effectively con- 
sists. It remains to determine the quantity of 
income, which cannot be specified unless there 
have previously been precisely determined the 
measure and the figure of wages. 

Now though it be true that the growth of 
accumulation virtually tends to bring about 
an increase in the amount paid in wages, it is 
nevertheless within the power of the capitalist 
to obviate this undesirable event by investing 
the growing accumulation in the form of tech- 
nical capital, which by its very nature is with- 
out influence upon wages. But the capitalist 
can do more than this. He can transform into 
technical capital a part of the capital which 
has hitherto been utilised in paying wages, 
thus throwing some of the workers out of em- 
ployment, or creating an industrial reserve 
army. This reserve army, on the one hand 
stifles all resistance on the part of the workers 



106 KARL MARX 

in active employment, keeping their wages at 
a level which will purchase the barest neces- 
saries, and on the other hand permits to capi- 
talist industry the sudden expansions in times 
of prosperity which to the capitalist are so 
desirable and so profitable. 

Thus Marx's qualitative investigation is suc- 
ceeded by a quantitative investigation, so that 
we learn, not only what surplus value is, but 
that it is equal to all the excess over and above 
the more or less limited subsistence of the 
worker, and that the worker is not merely de- 
frauded of part of the value resulting from his 
labour, but is reduced to a wretched pittance, 
happy if he can secure this, and if he be not 
condemned by the hopeless entanglements of 
capitalist relationships to submergence in the 
backwater of the most terrible poverty. The 
result is that to the favoured recipients of sur- 
plus value there is subject a brutalised crowd 
reduced to a narrow wage, while at a yet lower 
level there struggles in the morass the amor- 



KARL MARX 107 

phous mass of those who are condemned to 
labour without end. 

We thus realise, adds Marx, how profit is 
born of capital and is in its turn transformed 
into capital. But none of the considerations 
hitherto adduced suffice to make it clear what 
was the origin of primitive capital, that which 
first of all gave birth to profit, and conse- 
quently cannot be the product of profit. The 
celebrated section on the secret of primitive 
accumulation was intended to solve this prob- 
lem. Classical political economy, said Marx, 
regarded the formation of primitive capital as 
an episode which occurred during the first 
days of creation. In times long gone by, there 
were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, in- 
telligent, and above all frugal elite; the other, 
lazy rascals, spending their substance, and 
more, in riotous living. Thus it came to pass 
before long that the former became impover- 
ished whilst the latter grew wealthy, and the 
wealthy earned the gratitude of the poor by 



108 KARL MARX 

hiring these to work for them in return for a 
paltry wage. The theological legend of origi- 
nal sin tells us how man came to be condemned 
to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but 
the economic history of original sin reveals to 
us that there are people to whom this is by no 
means essential. We learn that one section of 
humanity has succeeded in eluding the divine 
judgment and in procuring for itself bread and 
cakes by the sweat of others. 

Unfortunately, continues Marx, a conscien- 
tious questioning of history discloses that prim- 
itive capital originated in very various ways, 
of a character anything but idyllic. Until the 
close of the fifteenth century there existed 
in England a race of peasant proprietors, nom- 
inally subject to the jurisdiction of the great 
lords of the soil. But the increasing demand 
for wool which resulted from the expansion 
of the Flemish wool industry, and the increas- 
ing demand for flesh meat consequent upon the 
growth of population, induced the great land- 



KARL MARX 109 

owners to destroy an agrarian system by which 
their returns from rent were rendered practi- 
cally nil. The free cultivators were brutally 
evicted from the fields which their ancestors 
had arduously tilled for centuries past, to be 
replaced by shepherds and flocks, the crowds 
of the expropriated hastening to the towns to 
offer the strength of their arms for hire. 

Here they happened upon a rout of usurers, 
traders, house-owners, enriched craftsmen, and 
lucky speculators; and here too were those 
who had expropriated them, the landowners 
who had heaped up savings by fair means or 
foul, but had hitherto been unable to turn their 
savings to account owing to the restrictions im- 
posed by the corporative economy (guild sys- 
tem). These accepted as a gift from heaven 
the influx of the proletarian multitude, and 
were not slow in setting the newcomers to 
work on behalf of the growing manufactures. 
Modern capitalist industry thus originated in 
a terrible expropriation of the working popu- 



no KARL MARX 

lation which transformed the independent 
peasants into an impoverished and hunger- 
stricken mob. But historic nemesis awaits this 
society conceived in theft, and Marx predicts 
its disastrous end in the ominous words: "The 
knell of capitalist property will sound; the 
expropriators will be expropriated." 

The fulfilment of the process will be effected 
by the forces inherent in the mechanism of the 
capitalist economy. The more extensive the 
development of that economy, the fiercer be- 
comes the internecine struggle between the in- 
dividual aggregations of capital, the more ex- 
tensive become the accumulations of wealth in 
the hands of capitalists of the upper stratum, 
and the smaller becomes the number of these; 
correlatively there takes place an increase in 
the size of the working and poverty-stricken 
crowd, the more hopeless and more pitiful be- 
comes its degradation, whilst simultaneously 
its cohesion grows more compact, for the work- 
ers are disciplined and organised by the very 



KARL MARX in 

process which associates labour in the factory 
and upon the land. At a given moment, when 
the number of mammoth capitalists has con- 
spicuously diminished, and when the pullulat- 
ing mass of proletarians has increased to an 
immeasurable degree and has been forced 
down into the most abject poverty, it will at 
length be easy to the dispossessed to expro- 
priate the small group of usurpers. 

Thus the expropriation of the masses by the 
few, which greeted the dawn of the contem- 
porary economic order, will be counterposed 
by the expropriation of the restricted number 
of masters at the hands of the proletarian 
masses, and this will triumphantly herald a 
calmer and more resplendent sunrise. 



CHAPTER IV 

A BROAD outline has now been given of the 
marvellous work which, whatever judgment 
we may feel it necessary to pass upon the value 
of the doctrines it enunciates, will remain for 
all time one of the loftiest summits ever 
climbed by human thought, one of the imper- 
ishable monuments of the creative powers of 
the human mind. Above all we are impressed 
and charmed by the magnificent quality of the 
exposition, in which but one defect can be 
pointed out, and this was probably imposed by 
the abnormal conditions under which the 
author wrote. 

We allude to the last chapter, the one that 
crowns the story of the historic expropriation 
of the workers with the eloquent example of 

112 






KARL MARX 113 

the colonies. Logically this chapter should 
precede the penultimate chapter, wherein 
Marx, from his account of these terrible hap- 
penings, casts the horoscope of revolution. It 
is probable that the inversion was deliberate, 
for the prophetic call to the proletarian revo- 
lution would have been more likely to attract 
the attention of the censorship had it been 
placed at the end of the volume. 

Apart from this trifling matter, we cannot 
but admire the shapely pyramidal construc- 
tion, the harmonious and flowing movement of 
the book, which, passing from the most subtle 
disquisitions upon the algebra of value, deals 
with the complexities of factory life and 
machine production, plunges into the inferno 
of workshops and mines and into the infamous 
stews of unspeakable poverty, to conclude with 
a description of the tragic expropriation of a 
suffering population. The work is a master- 
piece wherein all is great, all alike incom- 
parable and wonderful — the acuteness of the 



ii 4 KARL MARX 

analysis, the statuesque majesty of the whole, 
the style vibrant with sorrow or with indigna- 
tion according as the author is sympathising 
with the woes of the poor or scourging the 
villainies of the mighty, the vast learning, and 
the torrential impetus of passion. There is a 
stupendous harmony of irreconcilables, so that, 
as in the mysterious creations of nature, we 
find an almost inconceivable association of real 
symmetry with apparent disorder; an associa- 
tion of minute attention to detail with monu- 
mental synthesis, an association of mathemat- 
ics with history, an association of repose with 
movement; so that in all its fibres the book 
seems to be the offspring of an unfathomable 
and transcendental union between superhuman 
labour and superhuman pain. 

Nothing, therefore, is more natural or more 
readily explicable than the phenomenal suc- 
cess of Capital, a success which has rarely been 
paralleled in the history of intellectual pro- 
ductions. Translated into almost every Ian- 



KARL MARX 115 

guage (recently even into Chinese) ; eagerly 
read by men of learning no less than by states- 
men, by reactionaries as well as by rebels; 
quoted in parliaments and in meetings of the 
plebs, from the pulpit and from the platform, 
in huts and in palaces — it speedily secured a 
world-wide reputation for its author, making 
him the idol of the most irreconcilable classes 
and of the most contrasted stocks. Whereas, 
in fact, the prophetic announcement of the 
glorious advent of collective property led to 
the assembling round Marx of all the common 
people of the west, w 7 ho hailed him as avenger, 
as leader, and as seer of the onward march of 
the proletariat; in such countries as Russia, 
where capitalist development was as yet in its 
infancy, the bourgeois classes sang the praises 
of the book which announced the historic mis- 
sion of capitalism, and thus it was that the idol 
of the western petroleurs became in the far 
east of Europe the fetich of bankers and man- 
ufacturers. 



u6 KARL MARX 

After the first shock of surprise, however, 
readers turned to the dispassionate analysis of 
the individual doctrines advocated in the work, 
and were not slow to bring to light certain 
gaps and sophisms. To say truth, no sovereign 
importance can be attributed to any of these 
criticisms, nor is it necessary to make much of 
the numerous attacks upon the statistical dem- 
onstrations of Capital. 

It is undeniable that Marx's thesis of the 
progressive concentration of wealth into the 
hands of an ever-diminishing number of own- 
ers, and of the correlatively progressive im- 
poverishment of the common people, has not 
been confirmed. It has indeed been confuted 
by the most authoritative statistics collected 
since the publication of the book, for these 
show that the greater recipients of income in- 
crease more than proportionally to the medium 
and lesser recipients, whereas the number of 
taxpayers in the lowest grades diminishes, 
with a proportionate increase in the number 



KARL MARX 117 

of those at a slightly higher level. Further, 
as far as this last fact is concerned, there can 
be no doubt that wages have increased of late, 
so that they not merely rise above the mis- 
erable level of bare subsistence specified 
by Lassalle, but also rise above the level 
(which is still miserable, though a trifle 
higher) expressed in the calculations of 
Marx. 

It is, however, needful to add that the 
Marxist thesis merely points to a general tend- 
ency, and does not imply a denial that more 
or less considerable fluctuations may occur at 
particular periods. Moreover, the concen- 
tration of wealth does not find expression 
solely in the diminution of the numerical pro- 
portion between the greater and the lesser re- 
cipients of income, but in addition in a diminu- 
tion of the ratio between the taxpayers and the 
population and in an increase in the contrast 
between the wealth of the recipients of income 
in various grades. Further, the most authori- 



n8 KARL MARX 

tative statistics demonstrate a growing diminu- 
tion in the ratio between the owners and the 
general population. Again, no one can deny 
that the contrast between high grade and low 
grade incomes has of late exhibited an enor- 
mous increase; that banking concentration and 
the sway of the banks over industry (a source 
of increasing disparity in fortunes) has at- 
tained in recent years an intensity which even 
Marx could not have foreseen; and that, sub- 
sequently to the publication of Capital and to 
the death of its author, the social fauna has 
been enriched by an economic animal of a 
species previously unknown, the multimillion- 
aire, whose existence undeniably reveals an 
unprecedented advance in capitalist concen- 
tration. 

Nay more, after Marx's death, agrarian and 
industrial concentration attained preposterous 
proportions, such as he had never ventured to 
predict. In the American Union, a single 
landed estate will embrace territories equal to 



KARL MARX 119 

entire provinces, while industrial capital be- 
comes amassed by milliards in the hands of a 
few despotic trusts, so that two-thirds of the 
entire working population are employed by 
one-twentieth of all the separate enterprises in 
the country. These statements concern the 
apex of the social pyramid; but even at the 
base of that structure the phenomena are far 
from invalidating the Marxist conception to 
the extent which many contend. Correlatively 
with the undeniable rise in wages (which, 
moreover, has been arrested of late, and has 
been replaced by a definite movement of retro- 
gression), there has occurred an enormously 
greater increase in income, and therefore a 
deterioration in the relative condition of the 
workers. There has further been manifest an 
increasing instability of employment, so that 
unemployment has become more widespread 
and more frequent, exposing the working 
classes to impoverishment and incurable deg- 
radation. 



120 KARL MARX 

Marx's other theses, however, are open to 
more serious objection. Retracing the thread 
of his demonstrations with special attention to 
his study of primitive accumulation, no one 
can deny the absolute authenticity of the facts 
he narrated. Nor can Marx be blamed for 
having restricted his historic demonstration to 
England; though in actual fact the expropria- 
tion of the cultivators has been carried out 
everywhere, openly or tacitly, and everywhere 
this expropriation has been an initial stage in 
the foundation of capitalist property. Even 
Russia, who flattered herself upon her inde- 
pendence of the universal law and upon es- 
caping the fated expropriation of her peas- 
ants, Russia, whom Marx himself, as if in a 
sudden fit of mental aberration, was on the 
point of excluding from the sphere of his gen- 
eralisations, has to submit to the invariable 
rule, and to witness the transformation of her 
independent peasant proprietors into prole- 
tarians. 



KARL MARX 121 

The constitutional defect of this portion of 
Marx's book is of a very different character. 
Although he tells the story of the expropria- 
tion of the cultivators, he fails to explain why 
such expropriation must always take place, he 
fails to bring this great historical event be- 
neath the sway of a universal economic theory. 
Now, putting aside the incongruity that a book 
essentially founded upon logical demonstra- 
tion should all at once break off that demon- 
stration to turn to a historical disquisition and 
a simple record of facts, no one has any right 
to construct a theoretical generalisation upon 
the bare narration of hard facts without re- 
ferring these to the general psychological and 
logical causes which have produced them. It 
cannot be denied that in this respect Marx's 
demonstration presents a defect which it is im- 
possible to make good. 

Yet more serious criticism may be directed 
against the theory of the industrial reserve 
army, the theory wherein Marx attempts to 



122 KARL MARX 

sum up the law of population of the capitalist 
era. For the theory is wholly based upon the 
premise that the conversion of wage capital 
into technical capital is competent to bring 
about the permanent unemployment of labour, 
or definitively to reduce the demand for la- 
bour. Now this premise will not hold, for 
technical capital, by promptly increasing the 
profit of capital, and by lowering the price of 
the product in the long run, provides for the 
capitalist, first of all, and subsequently for the 
consumer, the possibility of fresh savings, and 
these in the end create a further demand for 
labour, so that sooner or later there will be a 
call upon the active services of the workers 
who are temporarily unemployed. Vain, 
therefore, is any attempt to make technical 
capital responsible for the relative excess of 
population, which technical capital cannot 
possibly produce, for this phenomenon must 
be referred to the presence and to the activity 
of a very different variety of capital, and one 



KARL MARX 123 

not considered by Marx, namely unproductive 
capital. 

But these criticisms, which after all touch 
no more than points of detail, are mere trifles 
in comparison with the incurable contradic- 
tions in which the author's fundamental theory 
is involved. In fact, by a vigorous deduction 
from his premise that the value of commodi- 
ties is measured by the mass of labour incor- 
porated in them, Marx arrives at the funda- 
mental and logical distinction between con- 
stant capital and variable capital. If, how- 
ever, the value of products be exclusively de- 
termined by the mass of labour incorporated 
in them, it is evident that the capital invested 
in machinery or in raw material can only 
transmit to the product a value exactly equal 
to the quantity of labour contained therein, 
without adding any surplus, and that it is 
therefore constant capital ; whereas wage capi- 
tal transmits to the product value equal to all 
the quantity of labour which it maintains and 



124 KARL MARX 

sets in motion, a quantity which, as we know, 
exceeds the quantity of labour contained in the 
capital itself. In other words, wage capital, 
besides reproducing its own value, furnishes a 
supplement or a surplus value, and is therefore 
variable capital. Consequently surplus value 
arises exclusively from variable capital, and 
is therefore precisely proportional to the quan- 
tity of this capital. 

It further ensues that of two undertakings 
employing equal amounts of aggregate capital, 
the one which employs a larger proportion of 
constant capital ought to furnish a profit and 
a rate of profit lower than that furnished by 
the other. But free competition among the 
capitalists enforces an equal rate of profit upon 
the capitals invested in the various undertak- 
ings, and leads to the immediate abandonment 
of undertakings requiring a greater proportion 
of constant capital, and to the correlative ex- 
pansion of the others. There consequently 
results an increase in the value of the products 



KARL MARX 125 

of the former undertakings, and a diminution 
in the value of the products of the latter. This 
process continues until the value of the respec- 
tive products furnishes an equal rate of profit 
to the capitals respectively employed in pro- 
ducing them. Value, therefore, though in the 
first instance it is equivalent to the labour em- 
ployed in producing the products, necessarily 
diverges from that standard in the end, and 
has then an utterly different measure. Thus 
the theory we are discussing is peremptorily 
refuted, or is reduced to absurdity. 

From the outset Marx is distinctly aware of 
the existence of this striking contradiction, 
which emerges in so formidable a manner in 
the first stage of his investigation; he frankly 
recognises it, but postpones its solution to the 
later volumes of his treatise. On the very 
morrow, indeed, of the publication of the first 
volume, he ardently set to work once more, and 
sketched to his friend, in monumental pages, 
the design of the complete book. Just as St. 



126 KARL MARX 

Augustine was grieved that the duties of his 
episcopate deprived him of the hours which 
he would have preferred to devote to the writ- 
ing of a volume to be the crown of his City of 
God, so Marx was harassed by the thought of 
the time which the work of party organisation 
filched from his scientific labours, and it was 
solely that he might escape from the absorbing 
engagements involved in the former task that 
in the Hague congress of 1872 he proposed the 
transfer of the International to New York. 

But now we unexpectedly reach a "dead 
point" in the biography of our thinker, for his 
mental life, otherwise so normal and so bril- 
liant, here suddenly becomes obscured, and is 
tinged with mystery and enigma. For, on the 
one hand, Marx clearly affirmed, and showed 
by his actions, that he definitely wished to de- 
vote himself to the completion of his treatise, 
whereas, on the other hand, it is undeniable 
that after the publication of the first volume of 
Capital, he never wrote another line of the 



KARL MARX 127 

book, and that all the posthumous additions to 
this volume were composed prior to 1867. I 
do not mean to imply that during subsequent 
years he gave himself up to inertia or repose, 
for it was during this period that he wrote all 
the economic section in Engels' booklet against 
Duhring; he learned Russian; he read the 
agricultural statistics of numerous countries 
and the reports on poverty in Ireland; he 
studied the matriarchal system; carried on in- 
genious discussions with Engels concerning 
Carey's theory of rent and Bastiat's theory of 
the cost of reproduction; threw light on the 
influence of fluctuations in the value of money 
upon the rate of profit; sketched a mathemati- 
cal theory of commercial cycles — in a word, 
his thought-process remained so active that 
when a certain publisher asked for the right 
to issue his complete works, he replied, "My 
works, those which represent my present 
thought, are not yet written." But the essen- 
tial work of his life, the work which had been 



i 2 8 KARL MARX 

so much cherished and which he again and 
again turned over in his thoughts, seems, as far 
as palpable traces are concerned, to have been 
entirely dismissed from his mind. We thus 
look on, marvelling and grieved, at the sight 
of the enfeebled hero withdrawing from the 
field, what time his banner, whose staff is not 
yet firmly implanted in the ground, is left as a 
target for the easy assaults of his emboldened 
adversaries. 

There certainly contributed to this intellec- 
tual shipwreck the illnesses and the misfor- 
tunes from which Marx suffered during the 
later years of his life. His health had been 
gravely undermined by overwork during the 
composition of the first volume of Capital and 
during the task of proletarian organisation; 
trouble from boils alternated with bronchitis, 
liver disorder, headache, and lumbago. In 
vain did he seek health in gentler climes, at 
Ramsgate, Ventnor, Neuenahr, Carlsbad, Al- 
giers, Monte Carlo, Vevey, and other fashion- 



KARL MARX 129 

able health resorts. All attempts at cure prov- 
ing inefficacious, he had at length to settle 
down once more in London. 

In 1 88 1 occurred the death of his wife; 
while the death of his beautiful daughter 
Jenny, Longuet's wife, in January, 1883, was, 
if possible, a yet more cruel blow. Marx 
never recovered from this last shock; hence- 
forward he was a broken man, the mere 
shadow of his former self; he passed his time 
contemplating the portraits of his two dear 
ones which Engels was to bury with him, and 
he no longer took any interest in the world 
around him or in the social tumult of which 
he was the inspirer and the originator. He 
died suddenly at two in the afternoon of 
March 14, 1883, while seated in his study 
chair. The titanic brain, which had given a 
new world to humanity, which had broken 
once for all the spiritual and material bond- 
age of mankind, had ceased to live and to 
vibrate. 



130 KARL MARX 

Most distressing of all, he had taken with 
him to the grave the solution of the formid- 
able enigma which everyone, the vulgar and 
the thinkers alike, had expected his genius to 
solve, and which no one else could unravel. 
It is true that shortly before his death he 
showed his friend the bulky manuscripts dic- 
tated in earlier days relating to the Criticism 
of Political Economy, suggesting that some- 
thing might be made of this collection. It is 
also true that Engels, faithful executor of his 
divinity's wishes, devoted himself with splen- 
did zeal to the publication of the manuscripts. 
But alas what delusion was in store for the 
admirers of the master! What a Russian cam- 
paign of disaster organised by enthusiastic 
lieutenants to the hurt of this Napoleon of 
thought! 

In 1885, two years after the death of Marx, 
there was published under Engels' supervision 
a so-called second volume of Capital. But 
the careless and pedestrian editorship, the long 



KARL MARX 131 

theoretical disquisitions making no appeal to 
facts for their justification, disquisitions in 
which the argumentative thread is continually 
broken, suffice to show that what we have be- 
fore us is not a book, hardly even a sketch for 
a book, but a series of casual writings com- 
posed for the purposes of study and for per- 
sonal illumination. Moreover, the work is 
wholly devoted to uninspiring monetary dis- 
cussions upon the circulation of capital, to 
dissertations concerning fixed and circulating 
capital, the formation of metallic reserves, the 
circulation of commodity-capital, etc. 

Noteworthy, in any case, are the investiga- 
tions which aim at throwing light on the proc- 
ess in virtue of which there is effected the 
formation of metallic reserves which remain 
out of circulation for a longer or shorter pe- 
riod. If, says Marx, a certain commodity re- 
quires for its production six months of labour, 
and cannot be sold until two months after its 
production has been completed, the capitalist, 



1 32 KARL MARX 

if he is to continue the work of production 
during the period in which the commodity 
remains unsold, has need of additional capital 
which he could dispense with if the sale could 
be effected immediately after production. But 
when, at the close of the circulation period, 
the capitalist resumes possession of the capital 
first utilised and realises it in money, he has no 
immediate need of all this capital, but only of 
the quantity necessary to make good the addi- 
tional capital which he has invested, that is to 
say, a quantity of capital equal to the difference 
between the primary capital and the supple- 
mentary capital; consequently the excess re- 
mains at liberty, and goes to constitute and to 
increase monetary reserves. These reserves 
are formed in addition, and by an analogous 
process, on account of the wear of machinery; 
for the portions of value transmitted by the 
machines to the product and correlative to the 
wear of these machines are pent up until the 
day of the complete destruction of the 



KARL MARX 133 

machines or of their necessary replacement. 
Thus the difference between the period of 
production and the period of exchange of the 
commodities, and the difference between the 
period of economic redintegration and the pe- 
riod of technical redintegration of the produc- 
tive machinery, give rise to the formation of 
monetary or capitalistic reserves, which be- 
come in their turn the source of intricate 
developments and interesting complications. 

The book likewise contains a masterly, 
though wordy and disconnected, account of the 
circulation of capital. But absolutely no- 
where does it touch on or even hint at the 
theoretical enigma left unsolved in the first 
volume. Solely in Engels' preface do we find 
an announcement that the definitive solution 
will be furnished in a subsequent volume, and 
a suggestion that in the interim economists en- 
gage in a sort of academic debate, and bring 
forward their respective solutions. There 
actually took part in this strange competition, 



134 KARL MARX 

with varying success, Conrad Schmidt, Lande, 
Lexis, Skworzoff, Stiebeling, Julius Wolf, 
Fireman, Lafargue, Soldi, Coletti, Graziadei, 
and myself. At length, however, in 1894, ap- 
peared the third volume, which was to reveal 
to an impatient world the desired solution. 

The solution reduces itself to this. It is 
true, says Marx, that the value commensurate 
to labour ends by assigning to the capitals re- 
spectively employed as constant and as vari- 
able, different rates of profit, and that this is 
radically incompatible with competition. But 
it is likewise true that products are not actually 
sold for their value, but for their price of 
production, which is equal to the capital con- 
sumed plus profit at the ordinary rate on the 
total capital employed. Certainly if we con- 
sider the mass of products sold, we find that 
their total price is precisely equal to their total 
value. But this integral value is not distrib- 
uted among the various products in proportion 
to the quantity of labour incorporated in them, 



KARL MARX i 35 

but in a lesser or greater proportion, according 
as the products themselves contain a greater or 
less proportion of the mean between the con- 
stant capital and the total capital; that is to 
say, the products containing a proportion of 
constant capital superior to the mean are sold 
at a price above their value in order to elimi- 
nate the deficiency of profit due to the prepon- 
derance of the capital which does not produce 
surplus value ; whereas the products containing 
a proportion of constant capital inferior to the 
mean are sold at a price less than their value 
so as to eliminate the excess of profit due to 
the preponderance of the capital that produces 
surplus value; whilst only the products con- 
taining the mean proportion of constant capi- 
tal and total capital are sold at a price pre- 
cisely identical with their value. 

But it soon becomes apparent that this so- 
called solution is little more than a play upon 
words, or, better expressed, little more than a 
solemn mystification. For when economists 



136 KARL MARX 

endeavour to throw light upon the laws of 
value, they naturally consider the value at 
which the commodities are actually sold, and 
not a fantastical or transcendental value, not 
a value which neither possesses nor can pos- 
sess any concrete relationship to facts. It may 
well be that value as determined by abstract 
economic theory will not always correspond 
precisely with value as a concrete fact, for the 
complexities and the manifold vicissitudes of 
real life impose obstacles; it may well be, in- 
deed, that to the rigidity of normal value, con- 
stituting the type of the relationship of ex- 
change, we ought to counterpose the compara- 
tively transient fluctuations of current value. 

But it must be understood that no logical fact 
should stand in the way of the realisation of 
normal value, for this, conversely, ought to be 
derived by logical necessity from fundamental 
economic premises. Of a value, indeed, which 
not only is not realised, but is not logically 
capable of realisation, the economist neither 



KARL MARX 137 

can nor ought to take any account; he should 
show in what respect, instead of being the ex- 
pression of what value is, it is the expression 
of what value is not and cannot be; he should 
point out the negation of every correct and 
positive theory of value. Now this value com- 
mensurate to labour, value as defined by 
Marx's theory, not merely has its realisation 
restricted or modified by the vicissitudes of 
reality, but further, as Marx himself is con- 
strained to recognise, is not logically capa- 
ble of realisation, seeing that it would give rise 
to results incompatible with the most elemen- 
tary advantage of those who effect the ex- 
change of commodities; consequently, it is not 
merely an abstraction remote from reality, but 
is incompatible with reality; not only is it an 
impossibility in the realm of fact, but further 
and above all it is a logical impossibility. 

Thus, far from effecting the salvation of the 
threatened doctrine, this alleged solution ad- 
ministers a death-blow, and implies the cate- 



138 KARL MARX 

gorical negation of what it professes to sup- 
port. For what meaning can there possibly be 
in this reduction of value to labour, the doc- 
trine dogmatically affirmed in the first volume, 
to one who already knows that the author is 
himself calmly prepared to jettison it? Is 
there any reason for surprise at Marx's hesita- 
tion to publish this so-called defence; need we 
wonder that his hand trembled, that his spirit 
quailed, before the inexorable act of destruc- 
tion? 

Despite all, however, genius will not be de- 
nied, and even this volume contains here and 
there masterly disquisitions, enriching the 
science of economics with new and fertile 
truths. It will be enough, in this connection, 
to refer to two theories. The first of these, the 
theory of the decline in the rate of profit, 
though not free from objection, is none the less 
inspired and profound. The second is the 
theory of absolute rent, a brilliant and acute 
deduction from the Marxist theory of value. 



KARL MARX 139 

This theory, indeed, as we saw just now, leads 
to the conclusion that value commensurate to 
labour furnishes an extra profit to the capital 
which produces commodities requiring for 
their production an above-average proportion 
of variable capital. Now, where free compe- 
tition exists, such extra profit cannot continue, 
and must necessarily be eliminated by a reduc- 
tion in the price of the product to a point be- 
low its value. But when competition is not 
fully free, there is no reason why such extra 
profit should not be permanent. Now 
agrarian production requires an abnormally 
high proportion of variable capital, and con- 
sequently agricultural produce, when sold for 
its value, furnishes an extra profit. But since 
land is a monopolised element, this extra profit 
can be permanently assigned to the owners of 
the soil, because there is no effective competi- 
tion to prevent their continuing to draw it. 
There thus comes into existence an absolute 
land rent, in opposition to or in addition to 



140 KARL MARX 

the differential rent of Ricardo's theory. This 
absolute rent is not due to the varying cost of 
production in different areas; it is not the ex- 
clusive appanage of lands more favourably 
situated or of lands of better quality; it arises 
solely from the excess in the value of agrarian 
produce over its cost of production, and is a 
general attribute of land per se, in virtue of its 
quality as a monopolised element. Marx 
acutely studies the manifold varieties of this 
rent, according as it is rendered in work, in 
produce, or in money; and with sound and 
far-reaching intuition he deduces from his 
theory explanations of the intricate agrarian 
relationships among the various peoples of the 
globe. 

Nor is this the only gem with which the 
work is adorned. Very remarkable are the 
pages upon merchants' capital and money- 
lenders' capital, on their despotic predomi- 
nance prior to the inauguration of the capi- 
talist regime, and upon their inevitable disso- 



KARL MARX 141 

lution after the advent of that regime. The 
closing pages, however, seem to breathe a 
vague weariness, and we find hardly any trace 
of masterly theoretical discussion of the class 
struggle, of its origin, of the instruments 
through which it operates, although this dis- 
cussion, according to the author's original 
plan, was to be the monumental crown of the 
titanic work. 

Thus, however fragmentarily, and thanks 
to the help of lieutenants and of disciples who 
were not always adequately instructed, the 
theoretical treatise, at once the pride and the 
torment of our prophet, at length arrived at 
completion. But the reader will not forget 
that to the positive treatment of his subject, 
Marx always counterposed a historico-critical 
investigation of the theories of his precursors, 
and in the more mature design of his work 
such an exposition was to follow upon the ex- 
position of his own doctrines and to form their 
apt complement. It remained, therefore, to 



1 42 KARL MARX 

bring to light this last part of his researches, a 
duty which was faithfully discharged (after 
the death of Engels) by Karl Kautsky, with 
the publication of the History of the Theory 
of Surplus Value, which appeared in four vol- 
umes during the years 1905 to 1910. Substan- 
tially, though publishers have preferred to 
treat it as a work apart, this book is nothing 
other than the concluding section of Capital, 
announced in the preface to the first volume, 
where the author tells of a sequel to be devoted 
to the history of this theory. 

In the posthumous work Marx traces the 
development of the theory of surplus value 
through its three essential stages, the prericar- 
dian, the Ricardian, and the postricardian. 
To the first of these phases belong the theories 
of the physiocratic school, whose essence Marx 
grasps with marvellous acuteness, maintaining 
that the theories in question were the doctrinal 
reflection of the interests of the rising capital- 
ist class, constrained to pretend that its own 



KARL MARX 143 

economic claims were the logical expression 
of the advantage of the landed and feudalist 
classes then politically dominant. Particu- 
larly noteworthy are the comments on the 
teaching of Adam Smith. The second volume 
contains a searching criticism of the Ricardian 
system, and above all of Ricardo's theories of 
value and of profit. In the third section Marx 
passes judgment on the theories of Ricardo's 
successors, Malthus, Senior, and John Stuart 
Mill, for these writers, says Marx, follow the 
setting sun of bourgeois economic science, fol- 
low that science to its now inevitable doom. 
It was a fixed idea with Marx that the theo- 
retical analysis of capitalist relationships had 
secured its fullest and most adequate expres- 
sion in the pages of Ricardo; he believed that 
Ricardo had supplied the ultimate synthesis 
possible on these lines; that any further prog- 
ress of economic science in its bourgeois trap- 
pings had become impossible; that its decline 
amid contradictions and perversions was in- 



i 4 4 KARL MARX 

evitable; and that economics could only be 
renewed and reborn when the disintegrated 
vesture of bourgeois economic relationships 
had been completely thrown aside to give place 
to a definitive and superior social form. It is 
scarcely necessary to point to the sophisms and 
the arbitrary assumptions upon which this con- 
cept is based; but it must be admitted that the 
poverty, deficiency, and incurable vanity of 
current economic science increasingly tend to 
give the theory an awkward semblance of 
truth. 



CHAPTER V 

To-DAY, now that the fruits of Marx's medi- 
tations, be it only as the result of the work of 
collaborators, be it only with many gaps and 
imperfections, have all been given forth to the 
reading world, it is at length possible to take 
a general view, and to pass a dispassionate 
judgment upon the pre-eminent worth of his 
writings. The most austere criticism must 
bow reverently before such gigantic mental 
attainments as have few counterparts in the 
history of scientific thought, garnering from 
all branches of knowledge on behalf of the 
undying cause of mankind. The most inexor- 
able criticism should recognise in Marx the 
supreme merit of having been the first to in- 
troduce the evolutionary concept into the do- 

H5 



1 46 KARL MARX 

main of sociology, the first to introduce it in 
the only form appropriate to social phenomena 
and social institutions ; not as the unceasing and 
gradual upward-movement outlined by Spen- 
cer, but as the succession of agelong cycles 
rhythmically interrupted by revolutionary ex- 
plosions, proceeding in accordance with the 
manner sketched by Lyell for geological evo- 
lution, and in our own time by de Vries for 
biological evolution. 

With the aid of this concept, strictly positive 
and scientific, Marx triumphantly overthrew, 
on the one hand classical economic science, 
taken prisoner by its own notion of a petrified 
society, and on the other the philosophy of 
law and idealist socialism which were con- 
vinced that it was possible to mould the world 
in accordance with the arbitrary conceptions 
of the thinker. Looked at in this light, the 
work of Marx presents a new instrument for 
the use of the philosophy of history and for 
the use of sociology; and it has contributed no 



KARL MARX 147 

less powerfully to the advance of technological 
science, thanks to the writer's masterly inves- 
tigation into the successive forms of the tech- 
nical instrument of productive machinery. In 
this respect more than in any others Marx may 
be compared with Darwin, and may indeed be 
spoken of as the Darwin of technology: for no 
one has ever had a profounder knowledge than 
Marx of the structural development of the in- 
dustrial mechanism, no one else has followed 
step by step the formation and upward elabo- 
ration of productive technique; just as Dar- 
win, with invincible mental energy, traced the 
evolution of animal technique, the develop- 
ment of the functional apparatus of organised 
beings. 

This physiology of industry, which is now 
the least studied and least appreciated of 
Marx's scientific labours, nevertheless consti- 
tutes his most considerable and most enduring 
contribution to science. Noteworthy, in espe- 
cial, and destined to form a permanent and in- 



148 KARL MARX 

tegral part of the economic science of the 
world, are Marx's analyses of money, credit, 
the circulation of capital, poverty, primitive 
accumulation, not to speak of the historico- 
critical investigations into the work of the 
British classical economists — for here Marx, 
without prejudice to the merits of those who 
have fought honourably in this difficult arena, 
will ever remain the most brilliant and most 
profound commentator. For these mighty 
and noble contributions, his name will be in- 
scribed in imperishable letters in the history 
of creative thought. 

But if his sociological, historical, and tech- 
nological investigations, if his studies of 
money, the banking system, and industrial sta- 
tistics, be so many intellectual jewels of which 
no praise can be excessive, it is none the less 
true that his fundamental economic theory is 
essentially vitiated and sophistical, and that he 
is himself responsible for reducing it to hope- 
less absurdity. We arrive, therefore, at this 



KARL MARX 149 

remarkable result: that Marx, whose primary 
aim it was to be a theorist of political econ- 
omy, and to deal only in subsidiary fashion 
with the philosophy of history and technology, 
secured a triumphant success in these subordi- 
nate fields; whereas in respect of the funda- 
mental object of his thought, his work was a 
complete failure. 

Nor can we deny that the very design of 
Marx's work, however marvellous in the 
Michelangelesque grandeur of its ensemble, 
does not satisfy those who insist upon strictly 
scientific method, and that in this respect 
Marx stands far below the great masters of 
positive science. For, however admirable and 
however great this man who succeeded in sub- 
suming an entire world within the limits of 
an extremely simple initial principle, and 
whose life was but the development of an 
equation which he had formulated at its out- 
set, how far more straightforward and trust- 
worthy, how far more scientific, was the 



150 KARL MARX 

method of Darwin, who never formulated any 
apriorist principles, but, quite free from pre- 
conceptions, accepted phenomena in the order 
of progressive complexity in which life itself 
presented them. Darwin first studied the nat- 
ural formation of organised beings, then de- 
voted himself to an examination of the larger 
types, and was finally led to infer their devel- 
opment by evolutionary growth. This method, 
which follows nature and reflects it, seems far 
more worthy of respect, far more honest, far 
more strictly scientific, than the other method, 
which manipulates the truth, does violence to 
the truth, in order to accommodate it to hidden 
ends. 

There is no reason, therefore, to be surprised 
that such a flood of criticism should have been 
directed against this colossus, or that on the 
morrow of the completion of Marx's work the 
skies of the two hemispheres should have rung 
with disorderly clamour proclaiming the 
crisis, nay the failure, of Marxism. But that 



KARL MARX i 5 i 

which is less easy to understand, that which 
discloses the utter immaturity of economic 
science as well as of contemporary socialism, 
is that criticism has not been directed against 
the truly vulnerable point of the system, but 
has been solely concerned in attacking its bet- 
ter defended and less fragile parts. In fact 
the scientific and socialist currents partially 
or wholly opposed to Marxism display a 
strange reverence for his theory of value, or 
do not venture to attack it, but concentrate 
their forces against the statistical and histori- 
cal theories which are the deductions and 
complements of the Marxist theory of value. 
In this respect the critics of Marxism form 
two very distinct groups. The first of these, 
the reformist or revisionist school, has a high 
respect for the master's theory of value, and 
reiterates it as an indisputable truth; whereas 
reformists criticise the theory of increasing 
misery, the theory of the concentration of capi- 
tal, and above all the catastrophic vision of the 



152 KARL MARX 

proletarian revolution. The writers of this 
school affirm, and think that in so doing they 
are setting up an antithesis to Marxism, that 
to await the millennium of the social revolu- 
tion is futile utopianism; they contend, that 
the progressive reduction in the number of the 
wealthy, paralleled by the ceaseless increase in 
the number of more and more impoverished 
proletarians, a development which according 
to Marx's vision was to provide the apparatus 
destined to destroy the contemporary econ- 
omy, is negatived by an actual tendency to- 
wards a more democratic distribution of com- 
modities; and they insist, therefore, that social- 
ism should aim at securing the triumph of its 
cause by means that are less violent but far 
more efficacious, namely by social legislation 
or by reforms tending to reduce inequality. 

Now, without troubling to repeat what I 
have already said, that the Marxist dynamic 
of the distribution of wealth is far from being 
as completely negatived by contemporary facts 



KARL MARX 153 

as these critics are pleased to insist, I merely 
propose to point out that this paying of high 
honour to reform and social legislation nowise 
conflicts with the doctrine or with the work 
of Marx, who, on the contrary, was the first to 
throw into high relief the pre-eminent value 
of social legislation, devoting classical chap- 
ters to the elucidation of its most memorable 
manifestations. In this light, therefore, re- 
visionism or reformism, far from being a nega- 
tion or correction of Marxism, is a specific 
application or partial realisation of the doc- 
trine, for it brings into the lime-light one of 
the numerous sides of that marvellous polyhe- 
dron, and deserves credit for having explained 
and developed this particular aspect of Marx- 
ism. 

But revisionism errs gravely in that it wishes 
to replace the beautiful and complex multi- 
plicity of the Marxist system by forcing us to 
contemplate this unilateral aspect alone. The 
reformists err in that they fail to see that legis- 



154 KARL MARX 

lative reforms, though desirable and extremely 
opportune, are invariably circumscribed by 
the prepotent opposition of the privileged 
classes, and can never do anything more than 
mitigate a few of the grosser harshnesses of 
the present system — whilst, precisely because 
they effect this mitigation, reforms tend to pre- 
serve an increasingly unstable economic order 
from the imminent disaster of a destructive 
cataclysm. 

If the reformist school mutilates Marxism 
thus violently, by reducing the whole of Capi- 
tal to the paragraphs extolling social legisla- 
tion, the syndicalists inflict a yet cruder 
mutilation on the Marxist system by tearing a 
single page out of Capital, to make of this 
page the alpha and the omega of their revolu- 
tionary creed. It is true that Marx, in the 
thirty-first chapter of Capital, makes an ex- 
plicit appeal to force, the midwife of every 
old society pregnant with a new one; but this 
appeal is not made until it has been fully dem- 



KARL MARX 155 

onstrated that the social revolution can only 
be effected at the close of a slow and lengthy 
evolutionary process which shall have caused 
complete disintegration of the existing eco- 
nomic order and shall have paved the way for 
its inevitable transformation into a superior 
order. 

Now the syndicalists unhesitatingly sponge 
all this demonstration from the slate, and af- 
firm that the proletarian masses can undertake 
action at any moment, can violently overthrow 
the prevailing economic order whenever it shall 
please them to do so; and they declare that it 
is needless for revolutionists to keep their eyes 
fixed upon the clock of history, in order to see 
if this is about to sound the knell of the pres- 
ent social order. It would be superfluous to 
demonstrate the absurdity of such a thesis, for 
the very school which proclaims it has assumed 
the task of giving it the lie in clamorous ac- 
cents. For if, as the new apostles of force con- 
tend, the proletarian masses can at any moment 



156 KARL MARX 

annihilate the prevailing economic order, why 
do they not rise against the capitalism they de- 
test, and replace it with the co-operative com- 
monwealth for which they long? Why is it 
that after so much noisy organisation, after so 
much declamation and delirious excitement, 
the utmost they are able to do is to tear up a 
few yards of railway track or to smash a street 
lamp? Do we not find here an irrefragable 
demonstration that force is not realisable at 
any given moment, but only in the historic 
hour when evolution shall have prepared the 
inevitable fall of the dominant economic 
system? 

Thus whatever they can do, it always seems 
that the infirm will of the disciples who de- 
mand an arbitrary renovation of the social 
system (whether by legal measures or by 
force) breaks vainly against the fatality of 
evolution, and that reformism and syndicalism 
are merely caricatures, counterfeits, or exag- 
gerations of the many-sided and well-balanced 



KARL MARX 157 

theory of the master, who proposed a threefold 
line of advance: by social legislation; by the 
activity of the organised workers ; and by revo- 
lution. In face of these various forms of neo- 
marxism, the outcome of mutilations and of 
one-sided exclusivism, Marx redivivus would 
have excellent reason for repeating his own 
adage, so thoughtful and so true, "I am not a 
Marxist." However striking the temporary 
success of these new forms among the crowd or 
among the learned, we may confidently predict 
that neither reformism nor syndicalism will 
definitively supplant the Marxist system, 
which despite all and against all remains and 
will remain a supreme and invincible force at 
once of theory and of organisation for the pro- 
letarian assault upon the long-enduring fort- 
ress of property. 

The value of Marx's work is, in fact, dis- 
played in the most brilliant light by the de- 
tailed criticism of the theorists and by the con- 
trast with opposing trends; all the more when 



158 KARL MARX 

we compare the aspect of economic thought 
and of proletarian organisation before and 
after the publication of Capital. For if we 
study the utterances of thinkers upon these 
matters during the middle of the nineteenth 
century, we find that nearly all are dominated 
by the categorical idea that the social order is 
of an absolutely immobile character, and that 
none but a few Utopians entertain the thought 
of changing that order by means of precipitate 
legislation inspired by their individual pre- 
conceptions. In any case, it was an idea com- 
mon to all, to revolutionists as well as to con- 
servatives, that the poverty of the masses was 
a negative and distressing residue from the 
economic system, that it was a purely passive 
feature of that system which must be accepted 
with resignation, for it could not exercise any 
propulsive influence in the general social 
movement. This is substantially the notion 
which emerges from Victor Hugo's Les Mis- 
irables, for poverty is here regarded as an 



KARL MARX 159, 

overwhelming mass of suffering for which it 
is impossible to assign the responsibility; it 
is looked upon as a load pressing with inexor- 
able cruelty upon suffering humanity, which 
is unable to respond by anything more effec- 
tive than complaints and tears. 

But how utterly different is the notion pre- 
vailing in our own days upon this matter. Not 
only is the conviction now rooted in the mind 
of every thinker that the economic order is 
subject to unceasing change, is advancing to- 
wards predestined destruction; but it is con- 
sidered certain that the artificer, the demiurge, 
the most potent factor of this destruction, will 
be the active resistance, the unrest, the rebel- 
lion, of the proletarians in the grasp of the 
capitalist machine and eager to destroy it. 
This conception of the dynamogenic function 
of poverty is the most characteristic feature of 
the social thought of our day, the feature 
wherein that thought contrasts most categoric- 
ally with the ideas of an earlier age. Just as 



160 KARL MARX 

the Christian sect, represented by Gibbon as a 
mere pathological efflorescence growing on the 
margin of Roman society, is by the better 
equipped science of our own time looked upon 
as having been the most potent solvent of the 
imperial complex and as the ferment generat- 
ing a new and better life, so the proletarian 
masses, regarded by the science and the art of 
the past as a crushed and pitiful appendage 
of the bourgeois economy, now appear to con- 
temporary science as the most vigorous among 
the forces tending to disintegrate that econ- 
omy, as tending irresistibly to create a higher 
and better balanced form of association. 

Correlatively with this development, where- 
as the proletarians of other days were content 
to sulk in their hovels as they contemplated 
the brilliant gyrations of the capitalist constel- 
lation, merely cursing in secret the sorrows of 
their lot, to-day the workers of the two worlds 
are advancing in serried ranks to the conquest 
of a new humanity and a new life. Thus the 



KARL MARX 161 

immobility of our fathers has given place to 
rapid movement; their discouragement and 
resignation, to rebellious demands; and where- 
as of old a chasm yawned between the 
scattered visionaries who entertained dreams 
of social rebirth and the inert mass of the 
poverty-stricken, we find to-day that the im- 
poverished are themselves becoming the artifi- 
cers, the heralds, the pioneers, of the irresist- 
ible ascent of humanity towards a juster 
and better social order. Now all this new 
moral and social world, unknown to our grand- 
parents, the glory and the plague of science, 
of society, of contemporary life; all this gi- 
gantic tumult of ideas, facts, claims, of as- 
saults, wounds, innovating reconstructions; all 
this marvellous necromancy is the work of one 
man, a sage and a martyr. All this we owe to 
Karl Marx. It measures, concretes, and ma- 
terialises for us his colossal worth and the 
omnipotent vastness of his achievement. 
Though science may well and with full right 



i6 2 KARL MARX 

complain of the gaps in his doctrinal system, 
though life may furnish the most definite refu- 
tations of his theoretical visions, and though 
future history may display forms of which he 
never dreamed, nevertheless, no one will ever 
be able to unseat him from his throne, or to 
dispute the sovereignty which accrues to him 
on account of his splendid contributions to 
civil progress. Whether praised and ac- 
cepted, or despised and rejected, by practice 
or by theory, by history or by reason, he will 
always remain the emperor in the realm of 
mind, the Prometheus foredestined to lead the 
human race towards the brilliant goal which 
awaits it in a future not perhaps immeasur- 
ably remote. 

For the day is coming. And in that day, 
when remorseless time shall have destroyed the 
statues of the saints and of the warriors, renas- 
cent humanity will raise in honour of the 
author of this work of destruction, upon the 
shores of his native stream, a huge mausoleum 



KARL MARX 163 

representing the proletarian breaking his 
chains and entering upon an era of conscious 
and glorious freedom. Thither will come the 
regenerated peoples bearing garlands of re- 
membrance and of gratitude to lay upon the 
shrine of the great thinker, who, amid suffer- 
ings, humiliations, and numberless privations, 
fought unceasingly for the ransom of man- 
kind. And the mothers, as they show to their 
children the suffering and suggestive figure, 
will say, their voices trembling with emotion 
and joy: See from what darkness our light has 
come forth; see how many tears have watered 
the seeds of our joy; look, and pay reverence 
to him who struggled, who suffered, who died 
for the Supreme Redemption. 



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